I think it would be so cool if Taiwan started using these “bollards” at red lights…and on one way streets: youtube.com/watch?v=EwmofOLUMW8
You’d need a net that rises with that to “catch” the scooters and motorcycles. I’m all for it!!!
What would happen? My guess is a sudden surge of interest in code-grabbing technology and an equally sudden appearance of bollard remote-controller gadgets on the market. 
“Hey! Watch this!”
presses button on remote
Screeeeeeeeeech… wham… crash…
Well, you get the picture
I was thinking more along the lines of an all-in-one radar detector / laser jammer / ETC scammer / bollard controller hacktastic device.
fantastic aren’t they?.. the crunch of the car behind’s bumper/radiator assembly getting mangled around the bollard is the sweet sound of justice… If they had them here the improvements would be incredible… thousands of police would no longer be needed to stand around enforcing red lights every rush hour like overgrown primary school hall monitors, so… er… well… that means we’ll never see them here then… :raspberry:
They should have them on pavements acivated by some kind of weight sensor, that might eliminate some of the wankers that ride their bikes at speed down the pavement to get to the front and push in, like the cavemen they are.
People here would just drive around them, on the sidewalk. The cops wouldn’t do anything about it. Some morons would get hurt and back the city up for 25 years with lawsuits, pleading ignorance.
I would be right pissed off if one of those things caught me when I was driving and smashed my car. Wouldn’t you? They sure don’t give you much of a warning before they come up. Imagine not being able to read the signs and being caught in a bus lane.
I was thinking more along the lines of enforcing redlights…that’d be cool.
you’d never have to watch tv again that’s for sure.
What would happen? Gridlock would paralyze the nation’s cities. Why? There would be morons impaled in every lane at every intersection all over each city, all the time. So all traffic would come to a standstill.
Some improvement! 
Looking at some skinny white chinese girls talking about hello kitty or whatever would no no match for that show.
And I would not have time eather since If Taiwan get’s them I’m going to invest in profesjonal equitment for bending and welding and start my own repair and painshop and buy a towaway truck.
I would be ritch.
I am all for giving each and everyone of those guys a camera and have them shoot every traffic rule violator that comes along. People here are well capable of reading the traffic lights, rush hour or not, and if they opt to not obey, let 'em pay. This in turn would generate the money given to the policemen doing the shooting.
As for advanced technology, the guys in charge of street construction and maintenance first have to learn how to build streets that doesn’t need to be “resurfaced” twice a year…
[quote=“hannes”]I am all for giving each and everyone of those guys a camera and have them shoot every traffic rule violator that comes along. People here are well capable of reading the traffic lights, rush hour or not, and if they opt to not obey, let 'em pay. This in turn would generate the money given to the policemen doing the shooting.
As for advanced technology, the guys in charge of street construction and maintenance first have to learn how to build streets that doesn’t need to be “resurfaced” twice a year…[/quote]
They can, but they choose not to… on both counts…
All traffic cops carry cameras for taking snaps of offenders, even the ones in the middle enforcing traffic lights… they don’t take photos of every offender simply because they don’t want the heat… if they snap every offender, people will complain, and they don’t want the attention… “cops” just want to keep their heads down, do as little as they can get away with and pick up their fat paycheck every month… “but it’s the duty of the police to enforce the law, being unpopular comes with the territory….” anyone with an elementary school diploma would say… their blanket qualifier/excuse/anti-logic response “警察也是人” :snivel:
as for roads… for wonderful examples of well built, well drained, well surfaced roads that are there year after year, despite heavy traffic and lashings by typhoons and earthquakes, look anywhere on the East coast, particularly between Taidong and Hualian… why can’t they achieve this engineering marvel anywhere on the West coast?.. a combination of off the scale laziness and incompetence, low public expectations and a contract tender system that sees every government road contract being sub contracted at least 4 or 5 times so that for every NT$1000 the government allocates for road building/repair $900 ends up filling hong baos and $100 actually gets spent on the road… :loco:
This kind of “planet Taiwan” unadulterated stupidity used to piss me off, but I actually find it quite amusing and almost satisfying ever since I accepted that the people who really suffer and will continue to suffer long into the future as a result of this incompetence are the exact same people who cause it, the Taiwanese themselves…
[radiohead] you do it to yourself, you do… and that’s what really hurts…[/radiohead]
I can understand that they don’t want the heat, but in terms of doing less, I think standing on the pavement (protected from rain and sun) and operating a camera should be much less work than standing amidst the traffic, waving a lot, and seeing all the people just ignoring you.
I thought they do such a lousy job because their pay is low…
[quote=“hannes”]
I thought they do such a lousy job because their pay is low…[/quote]
With time they can make as much as 100k a month. And when they are new to the job they can easily hit up illegal shops for red envelopes. Not to mention stealing their neighbor’s cars (happened to my girlfriend’s best friend’s family).
Yep, as I understand it, the second they graduate from their poop-brown uniform stage they’re making NT$47k a month, plus substantial govt. benefits… And as Mordeth said, that goes up quickly… Compared to any other form of unskilled labour work in Taiwan, police salaries are off the scale…
They would make a daily TV show of it … complete with all the obnoxious noises they put in at editing, to make it sound funny …
I have recently thought of making a compilation video of all the stupid morons that this place is filled with and then submitting it to the news or perhaps putting it online. I was thinking of calling it “What foreigners see in Taiwan” and simply putting clips back to back of all the crazy, wrong, thoughtless things that go on.