[quote=“Anubis”][quote=“Super Hans”]At least the super woofers work upside down. I wonder if the nodding dog still nods.
It’s despicable that in the last video you posted, it’s like nothing at all happened as everyone just sits there while some, albeit dumbwit, has been smacked into the asphalt.[/quote]
I guess the people are paralyzed by the stupidity.[/quote]
And no one wants to help in case they get sued too!
My wife tells me that if a scooter driver gets knocked over by another car, the scooter (as a result of the other car hitting) and driver then go in front of my car and I also hit him, I am also responsible financially. To me that make no legal sense of logical sense at all.
I am also told that even if the scooter smashes into me as a result of bad driving (scooter), I am also to blame as the scooter is smaller.
Besides the ridiculous traffic laws, any accident is a lottery. You can be set for life as a result of driving like total lunatic.
[quote=“Captain Stag”]There’s most likely some serious Taiwanese ‘anti-logic’ thinking from the government with the general public’s inability to demonstrate average driving skills. Something along the lines of, if all road users get proper driver’s training and skills, people will be confident to drive faster and be more dangerous. That makes no sense whatsoever, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it was one of the reasons behind the never ending circus out there.
Great link marty, i don’t think it could be worded any better :bravo:
That last 3 paragraphs should be printed on flyers and dumped all over the place, the traffic system and policing is an absolute joke.
This shit happens every single day in hundreds of other countries throughout the world, including the ones all the “foreign community” come from. As for the scooter accident and everyone getting along with life… both people in the crash got up and walked away. There’s nobody on the ground when the camera car rolls through. Done. Nothing more you can contribute to this. So move along. At least they didn’t act like people in the States and rubberneck the damn thing into a 20 mile long traffic jam on the other side of the crash.
The overturn one was hardly an overturn. The camera fell off the dashboard from hitting the divider poles. That’s it. Yep, he was stupid for moving into the van’s blindspot and even stupider for not having the reaction time to slow down for the THREE or FOUR seconds that he had to avoid the accident once the van started to move over. Shitty driver, he’s going to crash eventually. Basically anyone with a freakin’ figurine and a camera on their dashboard is bound to not care about driving, so this was eventually going to happen, it’s just great luck this one got recorded and posted on the internet.
These same BS “OMG THE DRIVERS ARE TERRIBLE HERE” hyperboles are the same reason why people think places like HWY 9 (which is a beautiful and quite safe drive) is a terrible death trap, and all sorts of other crap that keeps people from enjoying the most out of the roads here.[/quote]
Do you even drive here in Taiwan? I’ve had my drivers license for over 25 years now and driven in over 20 countries. Barring underdeveloped third world countries, Taiwan has the most number of incompetent drivers per capita imho. The number of drivers doing stupid and dangerous things which I see in one day of driving to and from work far outnumber what I see in a year of driving in other countries with the same development level as Taiwan.
Regarding the car being cut off by another on the highway, have you ever gotten stuck behind some fool doing 60kph in the express lane? Would you stay behind him from Taipei to Kaoshiong? Yes, I do agree with you; both drivers were idiots.
There are lot of Taiwan drivers/riders that completely disregard the right of way here… the way the enter the main traffic with out any consideration or even looking is what bug me the most. If i was in a car I’d run them over with our any remorse. Any time I encounter idiots like that I just curse at them loudly in Taiwanese, honk, give them a finger, and yell watch the damn traffic.
Take any decade in Taiwan versus any decade in the bay area and I do think Taiwan tops the accident and mayhem list. I just dont recall seeing anywhere nears the accidents over here as I did there.
Traffic is a severe problem on the wan and part of it is the massive scoot population.
[quote=“Nonsequitur”]
Do you even drive here in Taiwan? I’ve had my drivers license for over 25 years now and driven in over 20 countries. Barring underdeveloped third world countries, Taiwan has the most number of incompetent drivers per capita imho. The number of drivers doing stupid and dangerous things which I see in one day of driving to and from work far outnumber what I see in a year of driving in other countries with the same development level as Taiwan.
Regarding the car being cut off by another on the highway, have you ever gotten stuck behind some fool doing 60kph in the express lane? Would you stay behind him from Taipei to Kaoshiong? Yes, I do agree with you; both drivers were idiots.[/quote]
Yes, I’ve driven here, and I think people here are freaking out for relatively nothing. Taiwan is fine. Drive in Indonesia, Malaysia, Beijing, Manila, or hell, even the Washington DC beltway area and TW is comparably similar, and heck even “easy game”. Seems to me people are just complaining to complain. Granted things are much better in and around TPE than other parts of TW, and yes I have noticed particularly bad areas such as in and around Taoyuan City, but come on all this sounds a bit whiney, don’t you think?
That plus the fact that scooter riders do not f***ing signal…WTF? I always signal, especially on a scooter, cuz I don’t want some nutty drivers to hit my a$$.
No.
Malaysia? I find driving to be much better there. Indonesia…well, developing countries have an excuse.
But what good does comparing Taiwan with other countries do? The fact is, driving in Taiwan is shit. The drivers, if they were born with common sense, wouldn’t have the common sense they were born with.
As with almost everything else, Taiwan could do much better.
Taiwan sounds like my fucking school reports…Super Hans has potential, but he doesn’t apply himself. Super Hans could make top grades in English, but he chooses to stare out of the window.
But my teachers never compared me to other students. “Taiwan could do much better if it just concentrated on the quality of it’s coursework. But it’s OK because the Philippines has ADHD, China is the class bully and Indonesia drools and bangs it’s head in the corner.”
Rule #1 … never use your mirrors for anything else than comb your hair and pinch out pimples … the only direction to look is forward, anything behind you is NOT your concern …
The finger? That can be costly, dangerous even deadly … :ohreally:
From the people with the rose-tinted spectacles at the Taipei Times:
Everything gets a lot clearer when you put down the crack pipe and realize that Taiwanese driving isn’t some aberration in an otherwise utopian society. And it’s not going to be fixed by driver education or better policing. The “F*** you, me first!” mentality, refusal to take responsibility for personal actions, lack of empathy, disregard for the safety of others, etc is standard practice for 90% of the people living on this island and applies to every facet of daily life. It’s a cultural norm.
2,894 per 23,000,000 = 12.58 fatalities per 100,000 people (I think! My maths has gone to the dogs). My country, Australia, has about half that (it was 5.2 per 100,000 in 2010).
The US is practically as bad as Taiwan, with 12.3 fatalities per 100,000. The UK has 3.6 per 100,000.
Here’s some of those great skills at work passing on a mountain road in a blind turn. I’ve seen this a thousand times this time it “paid off”. Gambling is part of the culture here-no wonder its applied to their driving skills.
WARNING: Turn your speaker volume down-
Boom goes the dynamite-not too graphic.
Old but shows many things. A-Driver going through red light talking on cell phone. B-scooter driver approaching blind intersection too quickly C.-Taiwan cop rambling down the road after filming the whole thing in a CHA-BU-DUO gait. D-lazy municipal city planners who won't improve the blind intersection so they station cops there to catch people and increase city revenue.
THIS ONE IS GRAPHIC
For you New-bers riding scooters this will happen to you here if you ride here long enough. The woman with the Coach bag only uses the mirrors in her car to look at herself no doubt.
Here's a good one. A compilation that spans most of the driving situations here. My favorite is the first one, car stopping in a tunnel baseball bat guy. The tittle says "Driving in Asia" but the majority can be identified as Taiwan.
[quote=“antarcticbeech”]I think statistics on fatalities from vehicle accidents would be better than a personal impression. I can’t find more recent data for Taiwan.
2,894 per 23,000,000 = 12.58 fatalities per 100,000 people (I think! My maths has gone to the dogs). My country, Australia, has about half that (it was 5.2 per 100,000 in 2010).
The US is practically as bad as Taiwan, with 12.3 fatalities per 100,000. The UK has 3.6 per 100,000.
Is mabagal an American? [/quote]
Thanks I was looking at figures and what I saw was US is a lot worse than a lot of other places. I am comparing my experience here mostly to driving in America, primarily in DC, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, LA, Boston and numerous cross country trips and half-country trips.
I am also comparing it to a bunch of other countries, such as Malaysia, Philippines, Japan, China, Macau, patches of Europe (UK, Italy), South America as recently as the last three years. I was doing an MBA which basically means classes, projects and 2 year world tour. A lot of countries, a lot of driving around. I got branded on the first day as the “race car driver” since I raced cars pretty much full time for a year before b-school, so of course (or surprisingly) I always ended up driving. I’ve seen ridiculous pileups in Silicon Valley, epic day-long crash-caused jams in KL, people driving the wrong way down one way streets like it wasn’t anything in Bali, unbelievably bad road manners in Rome, the “let’s play road chicken” Beijing driving strategies, etc. I’ve also seen total, utter, unbelievable “looks like a mosh pit on the road” chaos that just somehow just seemed to work in Cairo, Mumbai and Ho Chi Minh City.
If all these people’s assessments are true, and things really are so much better in their countries, then I’d love to go to their countries. Personally, I think people are just bitching and whining. Bad drivers exist everywhere, and driving is as much more about being able to anticipate, adapt and react to situations than it is expecting other people to drive well or even predictably. If someone had a workable solution for TW or something that might help that they would actually commit energy to getting implemented, then maybe I wouldn’t put it this way, but so far, people are just complaining and complaining and complaining.
A long time ago an older motorcyclist friend told me long before I ever started riding: “If you ever decide to ride, remember this… Just imagine everyone on the road is trying to kill you.” I found this totally changed my perspective while being out on the road.
Note also that these accident death rates in TW are skewed towards inflation from the high number of people on scooters (and thus unprotected) and many smaller cars with poor crash ratings, but also could be attenuated by the fact that a larger percentage of people use public transportation in TW than in the US. I also think that the availability of video of these crashes in TW can also be attributed to the higher percentage of surveillance and road-recording cameras found in cars here. You never see one of those in the US or most anywhere else, for that matter, so I feel that crash footage is going to harder to come by there.
Yes, but you cannot do that comparison directly without accounting for the type of mile driven, among other factors. Firstly, note that the far higher use of public transportation here than in the US (where there are only maybe three cities you can really live without a car) automatically attenuates the kilometer driven per year per person figure quite significantly. So the people who are on the road in TW are driving more than those figures reflect.
Driving in a large part of Taiwan is akin to driving constantly in New York City and the surrounding burroughs. This is exacerbated by the fact that a large number of vehicles here (scooters) cannot drive on a highway, so the figures have an necessarily higher contribution from those vehicles, which spend a majority of their time driving where there are intersections and stoplights, turns and other hazards not present on a freeway.
A majority of the miles racked up in the United States are “highway miles” in that they are constant speed, intersection free, and comparably incident-free. Most accidents happen within 5-10 miles from people’s homes, not only because they likely spend the most time driving there, but because the transition from residential areas into business districts or onto the highway involves intersections, turns and stoplights. One should also note than the average commute in the USA has gotten longer and longer over time, and generally involves a lot of innocuous stop-and-go-traffic on a freeway, with basically zero lane-splitting motorcycles or scooters on the road.
A better figure would be road hours driven, and even then as with any statistics, one can tweak these numbers any way they want to serve their side of an argument.
Well that’s next to impossible to do as there are too many factors which make Taiwan and the U.S. different. I would also like to account for the U.S. having a lot of snow and ice to contend with. If we deducted their accidents which happened due to poor weather, as well as Taiwan’s then I’m sure we would have an even more exaggerated Taiwan figure. We also have the high proportion of light truck issue in the U.S. which tends to raise the level of accidents. The list of factors goes on, but based upon what I know of Taiwan’s issues so far, I find it hard to believe without strong evidence that the U.S. faces as many problems due to general impotency such as they do in Taiwan. The U.S. has a much stronger system of driver education, and from what I witnessed when driving over there on a couple of occasions, a much greater sense of spacial awareness.
I admit I have no experience on the East side of the land however, and so it might be so that New York is full of morons for all I know.
I tend to disagree with the way I understand your public transport point. The average mileage figures are not taking into account public transport. I’m not sure how your public transport point factors into the accident rate or death rate compared to miles travelled.
Actually, I just re-read that your figure is written per vehicle, not per capita. So, yes you are right that public transport usage would not have a deterministic effect there.
But anyway, since many of the figures being used to cite the “danger” of TW are traffic deaths/injuries per anum per capita, if we are considering it on a kilometer per capita basis, if half of the population takes public transportation exclusively (extreme number to simplify the example), the per-capita figures has little more than 12 million people in the denominator that drive zero miles a year. That’s what I meant by that.
Anyway, I think we both agree, these are impossible comparisons to make.
The fact is in the US, since States transfer licenses generally without road tests, you take one driving test your entire life when you are 16 years old (2 if you have a motorcycle license or CDL) and that’s it. The driving test is different per State, but is generally extremely easy to pass. Many States don’t even include backing into a space or parallel parking. It’s nothing like the German, Japanese or other EU testing and permit systems that are more thorough.
Written tests are generally “cram with the guidebook for 10 minutes while you wait and take the test”. Done. As a result, you’d be utterly appalled how bad and generally ignorant the drivers are there throughout.
The reason why American motorcyclists say “Assume everyone is trying to kill you,” is that US drivers generally have very poor spatial awareness, particularly when it comes to small vehicles. I’m actually quite surprised at how well cars know where scooters are here, particularly in relatively quickly-moving city traffic. Once you get over the swarm of freely lane-shifting scooter traffic, it’s not that bad. I’ll state again that driving in downtown Taoyuan is scary as hell with all the red-light running and general anarchy, but I’ve not experienced this sort of thing in Taipei.
One thing anecdotally that I have noted here is that at the karting track in fun karts, even the novice karting drivers here are generally much more aware of what’s going on around them than Americans in the same situation. The difference is extreme.
I actually think the main skew in the figures (particularly in incident per kilometer) and anecdotal “evidence” here the fact that a vast majority of the driving here happens on surface streets where there are intersections, buildings that obstruct view, and turns (both in the city and mountains). Since scooters cannot drive on highways, the figures are going to have a large contribution from vehicles that drive on these type of roads, which are naturally more dangerous.
POI -
Drivers license tests, the road tests, in all 50 states (I don’t know about to “the other 7”) require parallel parking as part of the test. The “road test” actually is performed on a road.
If you move from one state to another for residence, it is required to surrender your previous states license and apply for a license in your new state. This is supposed to be done within 30 days.
Many states also require the new arrival to take the written portion of the test - this varies by state.
If your previous state license has expired, for whatever reason, you are required to take both the written and the road test portions of the test.
These written tests are offered in a variety of languages - however all traffic signs are in english.
Due to my former occupations I have taken drivers license tests in Alaska, Arizona, California, Ohio as a result of lapsed/expired licenses. Funny thing though, my motorcycle endorsement transferred without having to re-take the test. I never understood how that worked - but I did not question it. They just noted it on my expired license and granted it on my new one.
I have also had DLs in Spain, Honduras and Italy as well as several International Driving Permits. When I went back to the U.S.A. I still had to follow their procedure for obtaining a new state of residence license.
I forget the specifics, but when I took my (only) road test in the States, I did not have to parallel park. I was, however 16, and had also just completed a teen driving school. My license never expired, but I did transfer it to 4 different States without ever having to take a written exam or driving test again. I did have to take a written test for my Motorcycle endorsement, after taking a weekend Motorcycle Safety Fundamentals course on the school-provided Ninja 250, but no driving test. If I never went to get an M-endorsement, I could have gone my whole life without ever taking another driving test or written test for my whole life. How many of you remember your highschool Chemistry material?
Point is a typical American only needs to pass the (very) easy test once, and they can the next day jump behind the wheel of their dad’s 500hp Corvette and crash themselves right into the emergency room. A high school classmate did just that. Additional education is only required if someone racks up a bunch of citations or is drunk driving. I realize in other countries there are much stricter probationary periods and things of this nature, as well as a much more stringent licensing system.
The overall point is that Taiwan is not alone in having aloof, dangerous drivers. The only real thing we can do other than rallying up legislative support to change education, enforcement or something else is to expect the worst and to be proactive about driving like a motorcyclist - as if everyone is out to kill you.
