its true, but i don’t think the locals find it to be a problem. they will ride either on a pavement full of people or on a busy road without a single care in the world. without a single look left or right. i mean i know they have some bike paths in the city but they are crap and they are kind of useless as they are only on a select streets.
Best to learn to share the road and bike lanes instead of thinking you own it.
If you’re going to be riding on the road it’s all about knowing which roads to take, traffic patterns, what parts of which road are less congested, have a bus lane and minimal buses is key to getting around.
If you’re in a hurry to get to the bike path, leave earlier. Otherwise, I don’t see how dangerous it can be to ride slow on the bike lanes that are available.
Let’s say you are in Daan, which is kind of the center of the city and normally takes you awhile to get to any riverside bike path, you can get to Dajia Riverside Park/Yuan Shan 100% on bike lanes.
From Daan MRT → head north on Fuxing North Road → take a left and head west on Nanjing East Road → hang right on Zhongshan North Road. Boom, you’re there and have ridden on designated bike lanes.
1 Like
sure if you know the way. i know the best roads to take in my neighbourhood too. if you just want to explore or if you are a tourist it doesn’t work though.
and yea you can kind of make it work if you have some experience riding here. I’ve been riding around here for several years now so i’m quite comfortable but lets not pretend its a good system or that its in any way safe.
It really isn’t, but I try to think, “at least we have it” and don’t get riled up when there’s hordes of pedestrians in the lane.
yea to be honest i like cylcing here. it wouldn’t be possible at home. its pretty flexible in that people accept if you ride on the pavement (they usually get out of your way and don’t find it a nuisance) or you can ride slow as you like on the road and people won’t get pissed off. other than the danger i have totally gotten used to it.
Exactly. At home, living in the US suburbs most roads have high speeds limits and no shoulder lane.
I sometimes wonder if Taipei is anything like riding through US cities like Chicago or NYC. Nice to know you don’t have to worry about buses going uptown and downtown in NYC and you got bike messengers doing crazy stuff like the scooters do here in Taipei.
This is great news! I’m so used to turning around at Bitan (before the suspension bridge) that I haven’t ventured upstream lately to notice any bike path construction. Do you know if the path will lead all the way to Wulai? It’s quite a distance, and the setting is very rural in most parts.
I used to ride a lot around downtown Boston (in the streets with traffic, basically the only place you can ride). It sucked. Felt super dangerous at all times with cars going fast and passing close.
In Taipei, once you learn the right roads to ride on, it actually feels super safe to me. I think it depends where you’re coming from. Of course Taipei will feel dangerous compared to Tokyo or Copenhagen, but it feels safe compared to most US cities.
God Boulder, CO is amazing though. The US isn’t a totally lost cause!
On my ride yesterday I noticed a new bike ramp leading up to Chongyang bridge (Taipei side). Since I was riding with a group I didn’t have the chance to explore. Has anyone taken this new ramp and crossed the bridge to get to Luzhou? Is there a ramp on the New Taipei side? This would be good news for cyclists from Luzhou who want to head into the city.
I took a ride out there yesterday and found the answer to my own question. No, there is no ramp on the Luzhou side. You’ll have to push your bike down two sets of stairs to get off the bridge and onto the bike path. Not only is there no ramp, once you ride up the nice, gentle ramp on the Taipei side, you’ll come to some stairs and will have to dismount and push your bike under the motorcycle ramp. Bad design. Not bike-friendly at all unless you want a bike-pushing workout.
In other riverside news, there’s a new reservoir just past the Taoyuan county border if you go all the way upstream along Dahan river. It’s got a nice bike path that circles the lake.
1 Like
i was thinking how the city bike paths they built in recent years are just a total waste of time and a fail - as in they fail to do the job they are designed for. people walk in the bike paths and its basically easier to ride on the road. its a whole lot of time and money to have the image of being a bike friendly ‘progressive’ city when in reality the traffic here is still completely backwards.
i think they could have done a much better and cheaper job if they did something like this
paint on a bike lane. a lot of the main roads are actually pretty wide. making it would be the easy part.
the problems would come from enforcing scooters not to use it and stopping people from parking cars on main streets, so yea a real bike lane is never going to happen here.
1 Like
The lane painted green in that photo is a pedestrian walkway, not a bike path. Or are you saying a bike lane should be painted like that?
There’s a pedestrian path like that near my house. It disappears right at the point where the road is only about one car-width wide, then starts up again later, so we still have to share the road. I often fantasize about augmenting the little white line with concrete blocks.
One of the notable failures (there are lots) in the Hau Lung-bin mayorship of our lovely capital was an attempt to do exactly this on Dunhua South Road. It turned out to be a fiasco as scooters, taxis, and all the other motorized vehicles used to using the right lane kept on using this space.
The current bike lanes in several cases (Xinsheng South Road, Fuxing South Road, Xinyi Road) were created by greatly widening the sidewalks and allotting dedicated space for bikes as part of this widening process. But you are absolutely right that the design in many cases failed, with the bike lanes either being too narrow or paved with the wrong grade of stone and therefore highly unpleasant to ride.
To its credit, the Ko government has actually noticed some of these problems, including the inexplicably idiotic blue blobs that were placed on the bikes paths on Fuxing South Road in front of Daan Vocational High School. The day after the last election, workers were out there removing the blobs and repaving the bike lane, using the correct grade of stones this time!
Baby steps here…but things are getting better. 
Guy
3 Likes
i’m saying that the bike lanes they made, took a lot of effort and they don’t even function. people walk all over them and its still easier to ride on the road (no people, less obstacles, even surface)
so it would have been better to have made a painted bike lane. obviously that comes with problems too, such as cars using the lane, which would be more of a hassle to deal with for the govt. so they went with the option that doesn’t work(imo) but looks nice.
i never knew about this, must have been before i came. i found a video on it.
yea thats basically exactly what i was describing. i don’t think you would even need the dividers(though they look nice) if you actually had some rules, riding on the road here works, thats my point, we just need enforced rules to keep the crap out of the lane(parked cars and such) so its safe.
sounds like it was a complete cluster! did they actually think people would not park and drive in it out of the goodness of their heart? and cars were allowed to use it in the week? what a mess.
Yes it was a mess.
But as they say: onward and upward! : D
Guy
WHAT?! The blue blobs are gone?! I move away and six months pass and EVERYTHING’S CHANGED!!!
Those things were the worst. I meant to put them on r/crappydesign
1 Like
Really, a lot of the lanes are perfectly adequate and the problem lies in users at this point. If you walk down Xinyi, for instance, you have YouBikes riding on the sidewalks, delivery people unloading on the bike paths, people walking down the middle section meant to separate the two and cars parking across the lanes at nearly every intersection. I really don’t think the government could have done anything to make the lanes that much better or clearer.
I agree that users are definitely part of the problem here.
But to use the example you brought up: the bikes lanes on Xinyi are simply too narrow. There’s almost no way that bikes travelling in different directions can pass each other. Better design would also certainly help.
Guy