If it’s regulated but not enforced then in what meaningful way is it regulated?
Because if a Caudillo comes along, he can use the existing laws to hound his political opponents and their supporters, see Zimbabwe and Venezuela and also to favor his supporters, see Mexico, Taiwan and Japan. Think of regulated but not enforced as a Damocles sword over the head of small business and homeowners as they generally bear the brunt of it. Legal limbo is not a place you want to be, ever.
Okami: Okay, that’s what I meant to say. Thanks.
Still, even if someone got into power and wanted to enforce, for instance, the many traffic regulations, would he be able to without any kind of popular revolt? I just couldn’t see it happening in Taiwan.
Probably, just bust out the redshirts after a bloody shirt incident* and everyone will get on board with a populist leader. Chavez did it with the boy crawling up scaffolding with the hot high voltage HID lights and it worked out great for him without anyone dying for a bloody shirt. It’s part of his popular appeal. I don’t believe that any culture is unsusceptible to a populist leader if pushed far enough by corruption or indifference by their political elite.
bloody shirt incident-When someone dies needlessly in some stupid way that allows the populists to lift their bloody shirt up and say “NO MAS!”
Probably, just bust out the redshirts after a bloody shirt incident* and everyone will get on board with a populist leader. Chavez did it with the boy crawling up scaffolding with the hot high voltage HID lights and it worked out great for him without anyone dying for a bloody shirt. It’s part of his popular appeal. I don’t believe that any culture is unsusceptible to a populist leader if pushed far enough by corruption or indifference by their political elite.
bloody shirt incident-When someone dies needlessly in some stupid way that allows the populists to lift their bloody shirt up and say “NO MAS!”[/quote]
Okami: How far would it have to go for traffic regulations to actually be enforced though in this country by any populist leader? Every week or two I see the aftermath of traffic accidents in Taoyuan. Every week or two. Seriously. It seems like it would have to be such an incredibly extreme event that people could write it off as being an incredibly extreme event.
For example, it might take some guy blatantly charging through a light that had been red for five seconds and running down a whole class of elementary school students outside a school before people would get all upset, but people would see this as an extreme event all in its own category. They wouldn’t relate it at all to the fifteen red lights they’d run in the past week. The crazy traffic here is not a matter of a handful of extremists holding the rest of the society to ransom with their recklessness. Of course, it’s also not the whole of society engaging in such recklessness (at least not at any one time!), but it is fairly mainstream behaviour that evidently, a great number of people don’t consider to be extreme or it wouldn’t happen so often. I would say that for every intersection I am ever at, there’s probably between a 25% and 50% chance someone will run the red light.
If you don’t die on the road, you will from the smell of restroom in one of those buses.
It’s okay to run a red light if you don’t hit anyone and you don’t get a ticket. It’s okay to have a near-miss and no-one should get upset about a near-miss that was caused by mind-numbing stupidity. If nothing happened, then nothing happened. That is the mindset I believe most of the population has.
Incredible. Are you sure?
Incredible. Are you sure?[/quote]
I cycle to and from work and almost everywhere else I can where I don’t have to leave my bike locked up outside (because I don’t want it to get stolen). The intersection of Tong An and Daxing West Roads is particularly insane. I’ve seen three there of a morning, I think, with ambulances. Sometimes, they’re just minor prangs, but probably once a month someone is bloodied. Back when I used to ride a scooter, I got cleaned up by a guy metres from the intersection of Sanmin Road and Chuenr Road dropping an unannounced right hand turn from the middle lane in the middle of a green light cycle in full peak hour traffic. I was about to accelerate, but I got a sense he (who was to my left and forward – so I may have been in his blindspot, but who the fuck does a right hand turn from the middle lane from one major road onto another major road in peak hour traffic?) was about to do it and slowed down considerably. I still hit him at probably 20km/hour or more. I lost skin in several places and had a pretty sore shoulder for the better part of a week. The thing was that I was on my way to teach some adults, so I turned up to class all bloodied (one of my students was a nurse and she rang one of the others who was running late to get some supplies) and had to teach the whole class sitting down. I could have cancelled, but it wasn’t severe.
This kind of low level stuff happens all the time in Taoyuan. Tonight, there was some sort of traffic issue right across the road from where I live. Two cars were blocking traffic and a policeman was talking to the drivers.
The final straw for me was near the beginning of this year. My friend and I were going up the hill at the top of Daxing West Road. A guy pulled out from the side of the road in his car, accelerated hard, braked hard, and dropped an unannounced right turn into a laneway. It was a little bit wet, though not raining. My friend braked hard. I braked hard and I skidded. I think I broke one of my toes because it still clicks now, and although I was wearing a full-face helmet, I opened up my chin pretty badly.
It’s fucking insane here in Taoyuan City. The roads are really badly maintained (which you really feel on a good bike) and they’re poorly designed/too narrow to begin with. Everything’s like a rally event here and you have to fight for every inch of road, complete with guys with perms and bear ears on their helmets overtaking on the wrong side of the road at least 40km/hour over the limit, parents with several kids without helmets on scooters, people towing handcarts piled three storeys high with recyclables, etc., and clowns in trucks riding their horns as if you have about two seconds to suddenly develop powers of levitation before they run you down. There’s virtually zero police presence so it’s an absolute free for all. I’ve been on a scooter with my wife and had a car nudge us to get us to move forward (despite there being nowhere to go to) in Zhongyuan. That’s happened twice on that little bit just before and after the railway.
I’ve had two accidents on my bicycle even. The first was when some adults ran across the road and stopped on the middle white line. I was about to go past them when a little kid about four years old ran out from a restaurant, past a car, to catch up with them. I braked, but still hit the kid and knocked him over. This was on a fairly busy street that everyone uses because it has fewer traffic lights. Fuck, what if I’d been driving a heavy vehicle (some guys really open it up down there)?
The other one was in peak hour traffic. I was in between parked cars on my right and a bit of a traffic jam on my left. An old lady on a scooter saw me, but still decided to pull out from between two parked cars anyway, but incredibly slowly. I had been braking the whole time, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. I stopped right up against her, but then came off the saddle and ended up leaning on her. I was completely off balance and she wasn’t stong enough to push me back and I ended up falling on top of her and her scooter with my bicycle.
Don’t assume that any local will use what we’d consider to be common sense on the road… lucky grandma or shou ben-ben’s family didn’t sue you to the teeth for ‘damages’. 
Taiwan has probably the highest number of (bus)crashes per km freeway in the world …
There are way too many vehicles per km of road in Taiwan, I often wonder why so many vehicles, I mean you don’t really need a vehicle if you live in Taipei anyways because you got public transportation. I wonder could Taiwan do it like Europe where getting a drivers license is very difficult (tests and re-tests, and lots of rules that are strictly enforced) and getting cars and stuff is expensive (and the extra expense is going towards better quality of vehicle).
Taipei isn’t so bad for the most part CARS drives normally. What annoys me the most are scooters. They seem to drive like they have no awareness of their environment. I seen tons of scooter stop in the middle of the road, then suddenly turn around, or just stop and move slowly, then stop, then turn around, or makes a 360 degree turn (what are they doing? merry go round?). You should check out ying jhuan road in Danshui… its the worst road in all of Taipei city/county area. I mean there are tons of people (because its a night market) but not only that you got tons of cars and truck going BOTH ways fighting for every inch of road, and the road is less than 10 meters (2 lane between buildings) wide. To make it worse you got vendors and parked vehicles making things difficult. Half the vehicles aren’t even supposed to park there by the way (they all have red lines), if the government wanted they could have towed all the vehicles and made a killing.
They drive in their own force-field-bubble … sometimes technology malfunctions tho … 
[quote]I mean you don’t really need a vehicle if you live in Taipei anyways because you got public transportation. I wonder could Taiwan do it like Europe where getting a drivers license is very difficult (tests and re-tests, and lots of rules that are strictly enforced) and getting cars and stuff is expensive (and the extra expense is going towards better quality of vehicle).[/quote] Very Taipei-centric thinking.
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]
I cycle to and from work and almost everywhere else I can where I don’t have to leave my bike locked up outside (because I don’t want it to get stolen). The intersection of Tong An and Daxing West Roads is particularly insane. I’ve seen three there of a morning, I think, with ambulances. Sometimes, they’re just minor prangs, but probably once a month someone is bloodied. Back when I used to ride a scooter, I got cleaned up by a guy metres from the intersection of Sanmin Road and Chuenr Road dropping an unannounced right hand turn from the middle lane in the middle of a green light cycle in full peak hour traffic. I was about to accelerate, but I got a sense he (who was to my left and forward – so I may have been in his blindspot, but who the fuck does a right hand turn from the middle lane from one major road onto another major road in peak hour traffic?) was about to do it and slowed down considerably. I still hit him at probably 20km/hour or more. I lost skin in several places and had a pretty sore shoulder for the better part of a week. The thing was that I was on my way to teach some adults, so I turned up to class all bloodied (one of my students was a nurse and she rang one of the others who was running late to get some supplies) and had to teach the whole class sitting down. I could have cancelled, but it wasn’t severe.
This kind of low level stuff happens all the time in Taoyuan. Tonight, there was some sort of traffic issue right across the road from where I live. Two cars were blocking traffic and a policeman was talking to the drivers.
The final straw for me was near the beginning of this year. My friend and I were going up the hill at the top of Daxing West Road. A guy pulled out from the side of the road in his car, accelerated hard, braked hard, and dropped an unannounced right turn into a laneway. It was a little bit wet, though not raining. My friend braked hard. I braked hard and I skidded. I think I broke one of my toes because it still clicks now, and although I was wearing a full-face helmet, I opened up my chin pretty badly.
It’s fucking insane here in Taoyuan City. The roads are really badly maintained (which you really feel on a good bike) and they’re poorly designed/too narrow to begin with. Everything’s like a rally event here and you have to fight for every inch of road, complete with guys with perms and bear ears on their helmets overtaking on the wrong side of the road at least 40km/hour over the limit, parents with several kids without helmets on scooters, people towing handcarts piled three storeys high with recyclables, etc., and clowns in trucks riding their horns as if you have about two seconds to suddenly develop powers of levitation before they run you down. There’s virtually zero police presence so it’s an absolute free for all. I’ve been on a scooter with my wife and had a car nudge us to get us to move forward (despite there being nowhere to go to) in Zhongyuan. That’s happened twice on that little bit just before and after the railway.
I’ve had two accidents on my bicycle even. The first was when some adults ran across the road and stopped on the middle white line. I was about to go past them when a little kid about four years old ran out from a restaurant, past a car, to catch up with them. I braked, but still hit the kid and knocked him over. This was on a fairly busy street that everyone uses because it has fewer traffic lights. Fuck, what if I’d been driving a heavy vehicle (some guys really open it up down there)?
The other one was in peak hour traffic. I was in between parked cars on my right and a bit of a traffic jam on my left. An old lady on a scooter saw me, but still decided to pull out from between two parked cars anyway, but incredibly slowly. I had been braking the whole time, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. I stopped right up against her, but then came off the saddle and ended up leaning on her. I was completely off balance and she wasn’t stong enough to push me back and I ended up falling on top of her and her scooter with my bicycle.[/quote]
Sounds wild out there in Taoyuan. In Taipei City at least the traffic doesn’t seem that bad, better than a lot of places in Asia, maybe comparable to somewhere in southern Europe. Most people drive okay, but you do see some crazy manoeuvres sometimes.
No, I read somewhere a few years ago that Turkey is the worst for bus crashes.
Mawvellous: Taipei City isn’t too bad, really. It has a large volume of traffic, but it’s relatively civilised compared to other parts of Taiwan and the roads are generally of a better quality (and policed). People get away with some of the crazy stuff they do outside Taipei simply because there isn’t that huge volume of traffic.
No, I read somewhere a few years ago that Turkey is the worst for bus crashes.
[/quote]
Yes in terms of actual bus crashes there are many places much worse than Taiwan. The accident rate in somewhere like India is absolutely horrific. The long distance sleeper buses in China are also an experience. Blind overtaking on mountain roads is routine.
At least the Taiwanese long distance buses are all relatively new, and the distances short.
Still working hours are too long and the prices too low. I saw the government recently forced the bus companies to increase prices. You could recently get a bus from Taipei to Taichung for only 80NT, with that kind of cut throat competition safety short-cuts are inevitable. The government forced the prices up to 120NT, and of course some DPP legislators complained.
Anyway good to see you are realising the need for proper regulation of the market. This applies to everything from inter-city buses in Taiwan to financial markets in London…
Of course. What else do the greens do but try their damnest to see Taiwanese killed, mained, or unemployed? 
Of course. What else do the greens do but try their damnest to see Taiwanese killed, mained, or unemployed? [/quote]
Muzha Man-green legislators did indeed complain. You can see a story about it here.
(I don’t doubt that blue legislators would have complained had a DPP government introduced a similar measure. Taiwanese politics is highly partisan.)
Of course. What else do the greens do but try their damnest to see Taiwanese killed, mained, or unemployed? [/quote]
Muzha Man-green legislators did indeed complain. You can see a story about it here.
(I don’t doubt that blue legislators would have complained had a DPP government introduced a similar measure. Taiwanese politics is highly partisan.)[/quote]
I know some complained. I am rolling my eyes at your gratuitous use of the phrase “of course”. Now I am rolling them at your scrambling attempt to appear neutral. 