What he said. 
I know several strips in Taipei where the lights are synched beautifully.
Unfortunately, none are on main arteries, since all those lights, at least twice a day, have some chimpanzee taxi driver flipping them on and off at random intervals based on his/her own sudden craving for a banana.
I don’t know the technical name for them, but let’s call them pressure pads - when you roll on to them it triggers a sensor which tells the trafic light there is a car waiting at the red light. As far as I know the system is not in use here.
Out in the sticks, these pressure pads would save everyone time and money. I regularly get stopped in the middle of nowhere, waiting for nothing to come through the intersection because the lights are sync’d. Often the waits can be a minute or nintey seconds long.
I think they don’t use this kind of technology because of the cost, and perhaps a scooter is too light to trigger the pad (not of course when the whole family and the dog are on the bike!) but it would be a good idea. I mentioned this to my fiancee the other week, who had never heard of such a device.
At 7:10am the lights on Chung Shan from Chung Hsiao to Min Sheng are perfectly synced if you travel at around 100kph all the way. Any slower and you will spend 3 minutes waiting at a pointless traffic light where a tiny street intersents with one of Taipei’s main A-roads.
This speeding is I presume what they are trying to encourage?
(On the other hand, if you throw an illegal right there at that red opposite the cop shop and travel up to Jian Guo, you can throw a quick right/left and double back on yourself and continue heading north under the Jian Guo. The roads here are set up to maximize fines. Look at the way bikes are sectioned off to the right, and sometimes middle, but always most dangerous part of the road, and not allowed to turn left. In the World, traffic is segregated according to intended direction of travel, here it is segregated according to vehicle class, regardless of intended direction of travel, meaning that cars, buses, and bikes must needlessly intersect each other’s paths at multiple points round the city. Simply beyond parody. Hence the anger and sarcasm.)
Sync the traffic lights here on the island?
Ohh yeah…lets let them build up even greater speed to sail thru the intersections…oh yeaaah.
ya know, I was thinking last night. I can’t recall seeing a ‘give way’ or ‘yeild’ sign around here. It’s either a stop sign or traffic lights.
Is this right?
[quote=“Truant”]ya know, I was thinking last night. I can’t recall seeing a ‘give way’ or ‘yeild’ sign around here. It’s either a stop sign or traffic lights.
Is this right?[/quote]
that’s why when the traffic lights malfunction nobody knows what to do…
[quote=“Truant”]ya know, I was thinking last night. I can’t recall seeing a ‘give way’ or ‘yeild’ sign around here. It’s either a stop sign or traffic lights.
Is this right?[/quote]
Nope, at least not where I live. The give way sign is an inverted triangle, white with a red border. The character
讓
(ràng - yield or give way) is printed in the middle of it.
[quote=“Taffy”][quote=“Truant”]ya know, I was thinking last night. I can’t recall seeing a ‘give way’ or ‘yeild’ sign around here. It’s either a stop sign or traffic lights.
Is this right?[/quote]
Nope, at least not where I live. The give way sign is an inverted triangle, white with a red border. The character
讓
(ràng - yield or give way) is printed in the middle of it.[/quote]
I kept my eyes peeled during the 30 min drive home. I saw one, and that was not technically on the road as it was on the exit from a Gas Station. But I did notice that character and the inverted triangle painted on the road of some side streets. May those signs make good BBQ covers or something out here. 
[quote=“Truant”]ya know, I was thinking last night. I can’t recall seeing a ‘give way’ or ‘yeild’ sign around here. It’s either a stop sign or traffic lights.
Is this right?[/quote]
They have them on the highway on-ramps, not that anyone really pays attention to them. 
Has anyone noticed any intersections such as the Chung-Hsaio/Dun-Hwa one (used to be at least), in the case where if you were traveling at the maximum permitted speed and just crossed the opening of the intersection as the light turned amber then you wouldn’t even make it to the other end of the intersection before the side traffic bombarded you on a green light? I always wondered what nut case timed those lights, they once or twice had me crapping myself ,wondering if I would ever make it to the other side.
I have learned now though that I must accelerate to about 80kph when entering an intersection to be certain of making it through and that’s why I don’t even know if they have changed the sequence since I used to have a problem.
Why don’t they sync the lights? Probably too much bother. No one follows traffic rules, so cops don’t enforce the rules, and so highway and signal engineers don’t give a toss about designing sensible roads and signals, and so maintenance workers and road builders don’t care about maintaining proper grading to smooth the roads and crown the road surfaces for proper drainage, and so people don’t follow the rules, cops don’t enforce the rules, and so highway and signal engineers don’t care… It’s just a big negative feedback loop clusterfuck.
If lights were delayed and people could see a green light in the distance, many would simply run the required number of reds to reach it. I’m sure something simple like delayed green lights for left turns would also yield chaos worse than what already exists.
It’s funny how from a satellite (Google Earth), or from still pictures, Taiwan looks like it has real roads. The facts on the ground are quite different. Lane markers often don’t match up properly from one side of an intersection to the other, for example. Anytime it rains it’s quite evident how little care or thought went into where the water should go. Storm drains are absent altogether, or are situated higher than the road surface, and a wet road surface shows a puckered mess of small depressions everywhere.
[quote=“sulavaca”]Has anyone noticed any intersections such as the Chung-Hsaio/Dun-Hwa one (used to be at least), in the case where if you were traveling at the maximum permitted speed and just crossed the opening of the intersection as the light turned amber then you wouldn’t even make it to the other end of the intersection before the side traffic bombarded you on a green light? I always wondered what nut case timed those lights, they once or twice had me crapping myself ,wondering if I would ever make it to the other side.
I have learned now though that I must accelerate to about 80kph when entering an intersection to be certain of making it through and that’s why I don’t even know if they have changed the sequence since I used to have a problem.[/quote]That’s why I said they can’t even get one set to work correctly. Even worse if you’re a pedestrian, took about about 60 seconds to walk cross, but gave you 5 seconds between changing from green and letting the cars past.