I don’t know yet if it’s real or just my imagination, but it seems that I’m getting cut off more often and that other drivers are just more aggressive toward me lately. The last week or so I’ve had more jackasses riding my bumper than ever before. If it used to be one in ten that would rather die than let me merge into ‘his’ lane, now it seems to be one in five. If I used to get overtaken in an needlessly aggressive manner once a day, now it’s four or five times.
Do you feel the general level of tension out on the roads is on the rise? Is it the anti-red backlash from the protests? I really can’t tell if everyone is just in a bad mood lately, or if it’s me being sensitive / paranoid. I’m wondering if I should maybe hide the red wagon until these protests are over and drive the wife’s car instead. Does anyone else with a red car have similar experiences? :s
In the last couple of days I’ve been cut off everytime I’ve driven and a scooter screamed out of a gas station yesterday (without looking) and ran into my side door! Maybe its the change in the weather? Maybe too much binlang or not enough sleep or maybe it goes in cycles?? My car is white but my eyes are red…
[quote=“Bubba 2 Guns”]Maybe you are just driving more. I found that the more I drive the more I get cut off. [/quote]:lol: Nice try, but actually I’ve been out less this last month or two since the weather has been so bad and I’ve been putting in so much overtime. I was just in Kaohsiung for the weekend however, which is kinda what prompted this thread. I noticed some more aggression here in Taichung, but down in Kaohsiung it’s almost palpable.
Have you been forgetting to turn your high beams on?
I find in the evening it’s getting worse. Shorter days and all that. In the daytime, it seems about the same.
I’ve notices a lot of angry impatient drivers and riders as well, including me. I thought I was going to have to defend myself the other day when some driver got out of his car to give me a riding lesson because he thought I had cut him off. Admittedly, I did cut a corner in front of him , but nothing out of the usual.
With the cooler weather and shorter days I’m sleeping very soundly and I’m a little groggy in the morning when I go to school. I wonder…
I wonder if I should change the color of my new helmut (red)?
[quote=“redwagon”]I don’t know yet if it’s real or just my imagination, but it seems that I’m getting cut off more often and that other drivers are just more aggressive toward me lately. The last week or so I’ve had more jackasses riding my bumper than ever before. If it used to be one in ten that would rather die than let me merge into ‘his’ lane, now it seems to be one in five. If I used to get overtaken in an needlessly aggressive manner once a day, now it’s four or five times.
Do you feel the general level of tension out on the roads is on the rise? Is it the anti-red backlash from the protests? I really can’t tell if everyone is just in a bad mood lately, or if it’s me being sensitive / paranoid. I’m wondering if I should maybe hide the red wagon until these protests are over and drive the wife’s car instead. Does anyone else with a red car have similar experiences? :s
Note: This thread is not about politics.[/quote]
I’ve had several strange near misses on the bike over the last few days…But only the frame is red. I think there is driving tension well-above normal these days.
[quote=“redwagon”]I don’t know yet if it’s real or just my imagination, but it seems that I’m getting cut off more often and that other drivers are just more aggressive toward me lately. The last week or so I’ve had more jackasses riding my bumper than ever before. If it used to be one in ten that would rather die than let me merge into ‘his’ lane, now it seems to be one in five. If I used to get overtaken in an needlessly aggressive manner once a day, now it’s four or five times.
Do you feel the general level of tension out on the roads is on the rise? Is it the anti-red backlash from the protests? I really can’t tell if everyone is just in a bad mood lately, or if it’s me being sensitive / paranoid. I’m wondering if I should maybe hide the red wagon until these protests are over and drive the wife’s car instead. Does anyone else with a red car have similar experiences? :s
Note: This thread is not about politics.[/quote]
It wasn’t just me then… escaping from Kaohsiung that night was un-fucking-believable, and I drive a green car so… As an added bonus I was on the freeway trying desperately to get as far away from Kaohsiung as possible when some prick in a black Merc pulls one of the stupidest moves I have ever seen in my entire driving career. I was doing about 120km/h on a two-lane stretch of the 1 and pulling towards a slower-moving coach with less than 1 1/2 car lengths between me and the coach. I see a car behind me flash their lights once and about a second later they are pulling into the gap at almost twice my speed and blasting off into the sunset. I accelerated as hard as possible behind them to get their plate number then pulled back and reported them. To their credit, and my amazement, a couple of miles on I saw the car sandwiched between three police cruisers on the hard shoulder with one of the cops stood holding some kind of shotgun or automatic rifle(!) I pulled into the next service station to calm down a bit and there was an absolutely blind-drunk driver wobbling out of his car. I reported him too and again the cops arrived within maybe 5-10 minutes.
The roads have been so tense in the past few weeks that I’ve had trouble sleeping and told my gf to calm me down if she sees me getting angry. I get a lot of shit if I ride the RZX even remotely aggressively so I’ve been driving a lot more and sometimes just deciding to stay at home. My friends all know how much I love riding and have asked me what’s up. Everyone and their dog has been cutting me off, up, down and sideways - from the taxi drivers to the Tai Ke and moms with BABY IN CAR stickers. People carrier drivers are even worse than usual (and that’s saying something) and apart from the freeway incidents above the cops have not been very helpful in cases of really dangerous driving (like 120km/h down Taichunggang road at 1am through red lights and drunken swerving… which is now happening maybe twice every night). I’m not even talking about the usual stupid driving that we can half-joke about… this is incredibly selfish, awful and life-threatening behaviour and it feels like it’s only got this bad during the last 3-4 weeks.
I’m going out now to buy two cameras for mounting on my bike and in the car. I figure I have two options for doing something about this… 1) start smashing in some heads with a baseball bat and end up in prison/hospital or 2) get evidence of what is going on in Taichung lately and if the police won’t act on it start sending stuff to the gossip rags.
I thought I noticed an increase in idiocy on the roads after getting back from Europe, but figured it couldn’t possibly be true, “even worse driving in Taichung” in a phrase that’s on a par logically with “temperatures below absolute zero”… Perhaps it’s just an increase in the saturation of idiots/m²… I have developed a useful technique to combat this rise in culpable stupidity though… Here in Taichung local males consider it nothing short of a slap in the face to have a foreigner stopped even a centimeter or two ahead of them at the lights… Therefore, when approaching a red light, if you stop waay our in front, past the turning box even, scooter mounted cretins arriving at the light will have no option but to come up and stop a further 20cm in front of you, to maintain the face, naturally… then, and here’s the tricky bit, you can rev your scoot, just a little, to give the cretin the impression you are going to get past him, this triggers an automatic knee jerk acceleration in the cretin… With practice and good timing you can get it just right so they pull this idiotic maneuver just as the taxi is overtaking the gravel truck in the scooter lane of the road you are waiting to cross, often with hilarious, but potentially life threatening results for the cretin… It’s not a technique for beginners, but with practice it really is a winner…
Plas -
I have noticed this thing you speak of.
I play a similar game sometimes, based on the “herd mentality” I see.
I stop in the back or middle of the scooter box. After watching traffic and an appropriate length of time, I accelerate as if the light has change and I am going to pull out. Then I stop just at the leading edge of the scooter box to wait for the light.
Many many many times I then chuckle as the other ‘scooteristas’ leap forward and enter the intersection only to discover they have been tricked.
I just chuckle and grin. Cruel perhaps, but immensely entertaining.
I used to do that too. I stopped, though, after I saw one of the cretins get t-boned by a taxi right in front of me and heard his leg snapping. Poor stupid little bastard looked about 12 years old, and the taxi driver looked like the kid’s hospital bills were really going to put a dent in his family’s life quality. I felt bad for weeks afterward.
I got a chuckle from the coments about Kaohsiung traffic. I have not noticed a difference here. Same old craziness. Construction everywhere, terrible road conditions, and very little law enforcement. It’s chaos on the road here.
I hate cars who cut into the scooter lane above anything. Most of them don’t even look and almost side-swipe scooters everytime they do it. ONE guy in ONE car basically slows down up to a dozen scooters and bikes, sometimes more, just because that ONE guy wants to save time. It gets to me. I often slow right down in front of these jerks and I force them back into the car lane that way. I figure that if every scooter rider did that, cars would stick to their respective lanes. It can be entertaining when the traffic is heavy and the car in question is unable to merge back into the car lane. As soon as the car finally manages to pull out from behind me back into the car lane, I speed up. I think they get the message.
Sometimes it’s a lost battle though. There are just too many drivers doing it and it makes it impossible to go faster than 40 safely because you never know when some ignorant will cut out of the car lane. This happens even more often when there is a red light ahead.
Try riding north bound from Kenting late Sunday afternoon in August. It’s life threatning. One has to pay attention to cars who may or may not break the law more so than to pot holes on the road. It’s not right.
[quote=“bobepine”]I got a chuckle from the coments about Kaohsiung traffic. I have not noticed a difference here. Same old craziness. Construction everywhere, terrible road conditions, and very little law enforcement. It’s chaos on the road here.
I hate cars who cut into the scooter lane above anything. Most of them don’t even look and almost side-swipe scooters everytime they do it. ONE guy in ONE car basically slows down up to a dozen scooters and bikes, sometimes more, just because that ONE guy wants to save time. It gets to me. I often slow right down in front of these jerks and I force them back into the car lane that way. I figure that if every scooter rider did that, cars would stick to their respective lanes. It can be entertaining when the traffic is heavy and the car in question is unable to merge back into the car lane. As soon as the car finally manages to pull out from behind me back into the car lane, I speed up. I think they get the message.
Sometimes it’s a lost battle though. There are just too many drivers doing it and it makes it impossible to go faster than 40 safely because you never know when some ignorant will cut out of the car lane. This happens even more often when there is a red light ahead.
Try riding north bound from Kending late Sunday afternoon in August. It’s life threatning. One has to pay attention to cars who may or may not break the law more so than to pot holes on the road. It’s not right.[/quote]
YES, my pet peeve. If I’m in the car I will pull out just far enough to block them and shout my now-catchprase… BU KE NENG (don’t think so)!!
I was delighted a few months back to see cops pull up about 3 pricks trying this on Dong Shan rd. in Taichung. They sped all the way under the railway bridge, popped out at the other end and… whoops. We had about a month of relative safety in the under-bridge bike lane but it didn’t last very long and they’re back at it with a vengeance. The latest trick seems to be indicating right then cutting back in at the top, presumably to use the ‘oh, but I thought this was the right-turn lane, officer!’ These guys make me angriest because they know exactly what they’re doing.
[quote=“llary”]These guys make me angriest because they know exactly what they’re doing.[/quote]I once had an aquaintance like this, almost a friend. We got to drinking too much scotch one night and he started bragging about his bag of dirty tricks for getting ahead in traffic. It was hard biting my tongue while he reeled off a long list of favorite manoevers I had had fist fights over, but it was enlightening.
I don’t think he ever worked out why I never spoke to him again. In short, they know exactly what they’re doing, in fact they spend hours thinking about strategy, and they think they should be congratulated for being so smart, rather than yelled at for being selfish.
I finally caught a “crash” on video just the other week. Well, it was more of a “tap” than a “crash”…but it was still nice to get on tape: youtube.com/v/INhYDOsYX8k
Are the drivers really that scary… SHould I wait till I go back to Canada before I start to ride again? That’s like cruel punishment. Maybe we should all carry some spiky things and just casually get ahead of the poor drivers and let the lil spikies do their work! I really hated poor drivers back in Canada as it was - they’d be so busy checking out the chick rider that they’d swerve into me! Ah. And it’s not as easy to handle a bike for sudden stops as it is for a car… They should be more considerate. OK. POP tires it is! HAHAHAH
[quote=“Mordeth”]I finally caught a “crash” on video just the other week. Well, it was more of a “tap” than a “crash”…but it was still nice to get on tape: youtube.com/v/INhYDOsYX8k[/quote]Mordeth -
One of your better vids. It looks a frikkin video game.
Stay safe.
