This is key. With the exception of a tiny number of professional drivers, people aren’t naturally skilled drivers. There will be a degree of higher reaction times and spatial awareness, but in general people are there or thereabouts the same. This is why training and a fit for purpose driving test is so important - and lacking in Taiwan.
Oh dear.
What are we doing wrong?
I firmly believe that the vast majority of traffic ills are caused by poorly designed roads and junctions. There are hundreds of studies over decades that support this claim. Take some drivers, put them on a shittily designed road, and you’ll see speeding, wrecklessness, and so on. Same drivers, improved designs, and magically the driving etiquette improves almost instantly.
Roads here, in particular in urban areas, have too many lanes that are too wide, not enough “traffic calming” features, poorly designed junctions that have literally dozens of potential conflict points, lanes that don’t line up, don’t have barriers, aren’t marked, aren’t free-flowing, poorly timed intersection signalling, poorly designed residential area road surfaces and pedestrian areas, and the list goes on.
IANACE (Civil Engineer), but you can read the studies and articles and watch YouTube videos yourself to see that Taiwan does an absolutely horrific job at creating a safe traffic environment.
The claims of “not enough space” to build proper road networks are based 100% on ignorance and 差不多. If I could change just one thing about this country, it would be to properly engineer the entire road network.
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Taiwanese : drive up your ass honk flash lights change lanes drive up ass of other car…repeat
What’s a mirror?
Outside of the ignoring of rules, I don’t feel the disproportionate of cars racing and speeding recklessly compared to other places. I encounter just as many if not more cars racing’s and speeding like crazy in the US. I feel significantly safer driving in Taiwan compared to driving in places like Italy. Italian drivers tail gate like crazy and speed way more than Taiwan. People don’t even drive that fast in Taiwan in general.
The difference being, outside Taiwan, new drivers are taught spatial awareness.
You can’t drive without spatial awareness in Taiwan. I would say it’s way better than in many places, US for certain. They give anyone a license in the US because you basically have to drive to function as a member of society. But you have a bigger window of mistakes in general. I trust the spatial awareness of drivers here far more.
I mean for me, yeah you’ll run into racing and speeding but no more than my experience in the US. And yeah people don’t follow the law as much and I agree here. But I just don’t feel like other aspects like driving in Taipei is so much worse than driving in NY outside of scooters. The scooters I hate.
Driving is definitely more taxing in Taiwan mentally, you have to be more aware. High density of cars and people. Smaller roads and bad road design. Also mountains and winding roads. But tbh people general drive slower imo compared to other places.
I’m happy to share the road with speeding BMWs here compared to 16 year old sally who has awful hand eye coordination and likes to text her friends while driving back in the US.
I’m getting some serious deja vu here. Didn’t we have these same discussions not long ago? And I see nobody has changed their minds. (Note to self: Nobody changes their f*&^%^ing minds on these forums. Just stick to food and music and weather. Exercise and diet may or may not be safe.)
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Malaysia is 10x worse. I just saw 2 major accidents today alone. One guy I saw dead from a bike accident. Blood everywhere and f course not wearing a helmet. Another one a guy flipped his car some how. It’s like daily here to see accidents. I’ve already saw 2 people die on the road since I got here.
I used to see that in Zhonghe every week. Probably a little better now.
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Quoting what I wrote above because I was reminded of that when I saw this story today…
[Woman loses control of her Porsche on Beiyi Rd, flips and totals car, buys a new Porsche the next day with cash.]
A couple of weeks ago I got T-boned on my scooter by a taxi driver (with a fare) going through a red about 5 seconds after the light had changed.
Luckily he slowed down as I did and the front of the bike was hit. The bonnet broke my fall.
He was apologetic and knew he had fucked up.
How—if at all—did you settle this?
Guy
That Porsche is shit anyways, not surprised it flipped.
Worse than Taiwan and scary. I used to drive regularly in Malaysia. One of the most bizzare situations is nighttime on a two-lane road. You can see two sets of headlights coming at you (one car passing the other) and it’s your reponsibility to get the hell out of way including pulling off the road. They both ignore you coming at them.
This goes without saying. 有现金又休闲
When did you move to China? 
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Sorry. My job is 100% in red China so my PC remains in simplified all day.
