As my title says…Taichung City is now an official “Roadeo” City…What is a “Roadeo” City you ask?
Well, it’s a city where the roads are mangled beyond recognition and that when you ride or drive on them, you feel as if you’re on a bucking bronco at the Calgary Stampede. Similiar to war torn nations, except that war is a valid reason to have busted roads.
In Taichung City, the roads have been getting actively destroyed by the water company, cable company, phone company and any other company that passes cables or pipes under the roads…these above mentioned outfits, which are comprised of the finest workers on this side of Bagdhad NEVER repair the damage they’ve caused to any road correctly…almost every road in Taichung City has had strips of road cut-out for pipe insertion…when they’re done doing whatever they had to do, they close the strips up with as little as possible pavement, and never compact it…so after 1 day or 2, it becomes a rut in the road (about 1.5m wide, and usually in the right lane or scooter lane)…This type of fine workmanship and other great examples are now everywhere in Taichung City…we have bumps, jumps (off manhole covers), ruts, craters (similar to the moon’s surface), dips, cliffs, steps and drop-offs for you to experience the thrill of being on a raging bull, all within the confines of a heavily populated urban area…and to add to the challenge of staying on, road lines are faded everywhere, so you have to guess where your lane is…and of course, the local folk use this to their advantage and just drift left to right without care…
But seriously…any other Taichung City residents notice the recent deterioration of the roads to the point that they are very unsafe, and the lack of anyone doing anything about it?..I ride a Majesty to work and I always get thrown around all over the place while riding…or when I drive my car, it feel like I’m driving a Special Stage in the Rally of Monte-Carlo…
Sorry for the rant…but I’m sure others here have the same feeling…
Man, you’re not joking–the roads in Taichung are pathetic. As soon as one crew finishes laying the blacktop on any given street, another crew comes in to dig it up and put in some pipe or cable. I used to think maybe it was bad luck to install pipe before laying the road. Then I thought maybe it had something to do with feng shui. But I’m beginning to suspect that the city of Taichung just outsources all planning to some local special-needs kindergarten. They just toss a street map and some crayons into a room with the kids, and come back for the new plans after all the crayons have been used up or eaten.
It makes me wonder how many times the Great Wall was dug up before they reckoned it was finished.
[quote=“Jeeves_Cripes”]Man, you’re not joking–the roads in Taichung are pathetic. As soon as one crew finishes laying the blacktop on any given street, another crew comes in to dig it up and put in some pipe or cable. I used to think maybe it was bad luck to install pipe before laying the road. Then I thought maybe it had something to do with feng shui. But I’m beginning to suspect that the city of Taichung just outsources all planning to some local special-needs kindergarten. They just toss a street map and some crayons into a room with the kids, and come back for the new plans after all the crayons have been used up or eaten.
It makes me wonder how many times the Great Wall was dug up before they reckoned it was finished.[/quote]
Exactly…don’t the locals notice this? this wouldn’t last a day in my hometown…a week at a stretch…here, it’s been over a year of rapidly worsening conditions…and no locals seem to have noticed. weird!
There’s a particular spot on JianGuo Rd, where a little railway-underpass for scooters comes out, that they’ve been trying to get flat for six months now. I’ve seen them chipping and hammering away at it three or four times at least, and it’s still so rough that people on scooters fall over coming around the tight bend out of the underpass every other day or so.
My real favorite though is the way they can’t decide where the middle of the road is, and keep moving it. So a lot of larger backroads have a double white stripe down the middle, surrounded by two or three blacked-out stripes on each side. In the rain, the whole thing becomes a death trap that’s even taken me down once.