Most of the scooter accidents I’ve seen were in the middle of major roads. All too often, some dumbass decides to make a left-turn at a busy intersection and either gets nailed from behind or from the front by someone who didn’t see him until it was too late. USE THE DAMN WHITE BOX, PEOPLE!
Yes, bus drivers and taxi drivers are idiots, but it’s the scooters that usually cause their own demise. Some do this by careless riding(swerving or ignoring their mirrors and signals) and others do this by ignoring the larger vehicles until it’s too late.
In theory, I’m sure we’d all like to believe that on the road, we are all equal in rights and importance, regardless of the size of our own respective vehicles. In Taiwan, in practice, this just isn’t so, and the sooner people(foreign and local) stop crying and complaining about it and just learn to ADAPT, the sooner we’ll all feel just a little safer on the roads.
The roads are congested. If some monkey on a scooter decides he wants to swerve in front of you, how is the driver of the car supposed to predict this? What if the car driver is accelerating at the same time as the monkey decides to cut him off? Sadly, in Taiwan, the resulting death of said monkey would be blamed on the car driver, even though it should really be the monkey’s family who has to pay to repair the damage caused to the car driver’s bloodied bumper.
I’m getting off-topic here. About the fines, I’m personally glad that they’re trying to enforce a few of the rules around here, regardless of their obvious reasons for doing so(budget cutbacks and inflating costs related to fuel and other things). I’ve had a couple of speeding tickets myself… can’t blame them for catching me when I know that I’m breaking the law!
The one thing I don’t like about the fines is how some things such as speeding tickets are so much more than the tickets you get for riding without a helmet. Having a kid on a motorcycle without any head gear should cost AT LEAST double what a speeding ticket does, but no, it’s only 500NT or something… in practice it’s nothing because the cops don’t seem to give a damn about that law yet… likely because a 500NT fine isn’t worth the trouble to them.