Scooter Pet Peeves

...because it's been a while, and I only have another month (ish) in which to experience (and complain about) Taiwanese traffic. So, what have I been noticing lately? Well...

1. Scooters might just be the reason for the terrible traffic light systems in Taiwan. This was actually a big breakthrough discovery for me. In America, as you may know, traffic lights are triggered in one of two ways: they run on a regular schedule, or they keep the dominant road on green unless a car pulls up to the light on the less-dominant road and triggers a switch. Well, so far as I can tell, this second system does not exist in Taiwan.

Rather, it is on a rigidly regular schedule which aligns all roads facing one direction--which is a bit eerie, at first, since it means that you'll be driving along, and suddenly see the traffic lights for every block within your sight-line turn yellow at once. It also is insanely obnoxious, since it absolutely guarantees that you will stop every X number of blocks, with X being determined by the schedule, how fast you're going, and how many slow-moving vehicles pull out in front of you along the way (but we'll get to that in a minute). The lights are so reliable that, at this point, I can pretty well tell you exactly where I'll have to stop every time I drive to school--and I know exactly how fast I have to go to get to where. (Woo, made it to Yisin this morning! Or: gaaah, Ersheng, I'm going to be late. Stupid tour bus!)

Now, granted, I've been out of the Stateside driving routine for almost a year now, so please correct me if I'm remembering it incorrectly. But aren't the scheduled lights there rigged so that, if you hit a green, you usually hit all greens; if you hit a red, you usually hit only one, followed by a string of greens? I don't think it' even something you usually notice, I just have a distinct memory of many, MANY trips where I hit all yellows, like four lights in a row's worth of just-long-enough lights--until eventually I hit one that I couldn't help but stop for unless I wanted a ticket and/or an accident.

Besides that, greens are more prevalent on major roads because the minor roads are almost all run on pressure sensors, which means that those roads only get the green if they're actually needed. And, after 10 months here in Taiwan, where the number of vacant alleyways with green lights as I sit at a red, coupled with a general lack of traffic law enforcement, has led me to routinely determining if I am at a "necessary" (stop and wait) or "non-necessary" (look and go!) red light, green-lighting major roads at the expense of smaller ones seems like a great idea.

A few days ago, though, while reading this Cracked.com article, I realized why they can't have them here: scooters can't trigger pressure-based lights! And since the vast majority of Taiwan's (or, at least, Kaohsiung's) motorists sit perched not in cars or trucks but on scooters or motorcycles, a lights system that caters to larger vehicles while stranding smaller ones just wouldn't make sense.

Still, it seems like they should be able to just develop a more sensitive sensor...or at least make the schedule according to actual traffic patterns, rather than an arbitrary grid!

2. Dear Car-drivers of Kaohsiung: We'll get out of your lanes as soon as you stop using ours as a parking lot. Sincerely, Scooter-drivers of Kaohsiung.

Most major Kaohsiung roads have one of two set-ups: either several car lanes, a barrier, and a scooter lane, or several car lanes, a line, and a scooter lane/road shoulder. It should be noted that, on the outside corner of every scooter lane and/or road shoulder, there are usually parking spaces. If there is no space for parking spaces, there is a solid red line along the curb.

But see, here's the problem: no one cares. Remember earlier when I mentioned traffic laws rarely get enforced here? Well, that applies to parking laws, too, to some extent. (I do see roving parking ticket-givers, but it doesn't seem to do much to deter illegal parking.) On any given road, with or without space to park, let alone actual parking spaces, there will be two rows of parked or parking cars. Double-parking is not just common, it's absolutely the norm.

But wait, you say, you just said there's no room for them to park! Ah, yes, but you forget, there's a whole scooter lane/ shoulder of the road to be used! Because, CLEARLY, that's what that extra space is there for, right? It's not like it's legally set aside for scooters or anything! No, this must be extra parking space. Obviously.

As a scooter-driver, this is absolutely infuriating.  I'll be driving along, minding my own business, when I see that the double row of parked cars up ahead has completely filled up my lane. Obviously, I safely swerve left, into the car lane--doing my best to avoid the bottleneck of other scooters all also trying to avoid a collision--and get honked at. I'm sorry, but what? We're in your way, you say? We're in your lane, you say? AND WHY DO YOU THINK THAT MIGHT BE???

So sorry, car-drivers of Kaohsiung. I will not stay out of your lane--and, until you clean out mine, please refrain from asking me to. But, sadly, that's not even the only way cars abuse the scooter lane, which brings me to...

3. It's a scooter lane, not the pick-up/drop-off lane.

This one only really applies to the really big roads, i.e. those with a barrier and real separate scooter lane. Most of the roads I take to get to work fall into this category. And, on this one, I'm willing to shift the primary blame from the car-drivers to the civil engineers who designed the roads. They designed them terribly.

I already mentioned that most roads have parking spots along the far outside edge. What I didn't mention, though, is that those spots are almost always filled, being filled, or being vacated, thus creating a near-constant, yet unpredictable and largely blinker-free flow of very slow moving vehicles into and out of the scooter lane. There are no parking spaces or places to stop along the main car lanes. So, to get its passengers anywhere near the businesses/homes they're trying to get to, car driver must pull out of their lane and merge with the scooters, then find a parking space and pull into it. Not surprisingly, this is a very slow process--slow merge into the oncoming scooters, slow crawl lest you miss a spot; absolute dead stop when you realize there are no spots to be taken.

All this in the midst of normal-speed scooters just trying to make it to wherever they're going on time. It's insanity. Once, on the way to the gym, I found myself in a cluster of scooters who had to come to a complete, lane-wide stop because a tour bus had parked itself smack-dab in the middle of the lane and was disembarking its passengers. Eventually, a few people discovered we could still squeeze around the corner of the bus next to the barrier (barely!), while most just took the Taiwan-ordinary (yet also insane) option of taking to the sidewalk.

Civil engineers, here's a thought: car parking spaces along the side of the car lanes; scooter lanes exclusively for scooters. You'd have less double-parking AND, I'd wager, fewer accidents (no more unexpected merges; no more sudden car doors!). So, please? All you'd have to do is move the barrier and re-cast the sidewalk...

4. If you're going to cut me off, please have the decency to keep going afterwards.

This one's short, but I cannot stress enough how annoying it is. At this point, I know how fast I drive comparative to others; I can usually tell, at a glance, whom I should be ahead of and behind at a given stoplight if I want to avoid the annoying-for-everybody dance of passing and being passed. But others, apparently, either don't know or don't care about this.

This pet peeve manifests itself in two ways. In the first, as I'm stopped at a light, someone pulls around me and stops directly in front, cutting me off from moving until they do--which invariably takes ages and is ridiculously slow. My best guess for a reason behind this is that they don't want to breathe in exhaust fumes, which is fair enough, though a bit selfish, since they're directly funneling their fumes at me as a result. In the second, while driving, someone zooms around me and immediately slows down--usually so that they can coast at a good 10km/hr for a good block or so before the actual upcoming stoplight, which they will not actually make it to because they're aiming for the patch of shade 50ft back. I've been told that stopping back from the light in order to be in shade is illegal--it's dangerous, at any rate: you're intentionally stopping in the middle of the road!--but it's absurdly prevalent here, thanks to the desire to avoid getting tan.

And look, I get it: you don't want to breathe in exhaust, or you don't want to shoot your breaks, and you want to stop back from the light, or you don't want to get tan. Okay. That's fine. But please, PLEASE don't pass people if you're planning on doing it! Again, it's unsafe, selfish, and just flat out rude.

So those are my pet peeves of the day. And if you're ever in Taiwan...please remember: scooter-ers are people too!

Traffic (part 1)

I suppose now, at long last, I will write about scootering. The impetus is simple: this morning, I arrived at school approximately 3 minutes before the start of my first class. When I left my apartment, I was estimating I would arrive approximately 15 minutes early. Oh, the added joys of needing to stop for gas and meeting rush hour traffic at 7:30am.

I wish I had photos or a video to illustrate. However, when you're caught in the middle of a throng of several hundred scooters all trying to squeeze into a sudden half-lane where seconds ago there were three full lanes (I'm looking at you, intersection of Zhong Shan and Kaisyuan), you're not really thinking about whipping out your camera.

It's been a few months now since I started scootering here in Taiwan, and I feel that I've established a sort of equilibrium with the vehicle and the traffic: I no longer have to think about what I'm doing in order to get where I need to go, and I now know what I can and cannot do in traffic. Here's a hint: these lists rarely coincide with the local laws.

And that is because, in truth, there is only one law in Taiwanese scootering: watch the people in front of you and make sure you don't run into anyone/thing. (I used to say the one law was don't kill anyone, but the two kind of merge together when you think about it.) I've mentioned this to a lot of people already at this point, but scootering here became a lot easier for me once I realized that it follows the exact same rules as downhill skiing: whoever is behind has full responsibility to watch out for whoever is in front. Of course, just to be safe, though, it's always best to steer a straight course and avoid sudden moves.

Which would be a lot simpler if it weren't for the way the roads here are constructed. Most of the major roads have designated scooter lanes set off from the main road by a concrete median (the smaller roads have something more akin to a bike lane/extra wide shoulder, and scooters are allowed into the outermost lanes in any case). However, the scooter lanes serve a dual purpose as the sole access point to any and all businesses along the street, streetside parking, and many alleyways, which means that cars are continuously pulling into and out of the flow of scooter traffic, going approximately a third of the average speed and apt to behave irregularly, doing things like stopping suddenly to back into a spot, or turn without signaling just as scooters are trying to go around their hulking slowness. And then there's the ever-present concern that parked cars might open a door at just the wrong moment.

And that's not even to mention intersections, where cars turning across (or with) traffic are a frequent occurrence, leading to a regular game of chicken, as they may or may not remember that there is a scooter lane, and that, size notwithstanding, scooter drivers also have a right to be on the road.

Which brings me to another basic tenant of Taiwanese driving: here, green lights mean nothing and red lights mean less. Here's a hint: there's some causality in that statement. No matter the light color, the solitary rule of driving applies: look in front of you (and to each side) before proceeding. Chances are, there's another vehicle barreling through that red light of 15 seconds, or maybe the coast is clear and you're fine to go on, no matter that the light is red. These are the rules of the road.

And oh, what a road it is, full of manholes and sewer covers which would be nothing to a car but which are, to scooters, jolting affairs which intimately acquaint knees with handlebars. I understand the reasons for consistently putting these obstructions in the scooter lane (closer to the side of the road, easier to access, easier to divert traffic in the event of work), but still, it's hard not to wonder why as I catapult over another metal lid and look over to the smooth, smooth pavement of the car lanes.

That's it for now--this is something of an endless font of content, so I'm sure I'll be returning to it soon, maybe to comment on helmet usage, or the classic question, "how many people can fit on a scooter?" Drivers here seem never to find a conclusive answer on that one...