Tai Yuan Road

One morning last week the boys and I headed to the breakfast shop. Early - rush hour-y. There had been a scooter-on-motorcycle accident, leaving both vehicles in the road, in the way. The people were long gone, having been ambulanced to the hospital. The girls at the breakfast shop said the accident had happened 45 minutes before we got there. While we ate, the police showed up to take measurements and pictures.



All-told, the scooter and motorcycle sat in the intersection for about 2 hours, joined by a police car only for the last 30 minutes. It's insane to me that traffic flow is routinely inconvenienced and endangered by these unmarked fallen vehicles...



One of my heroes, Michael Turton has written and photo-journaled on the fiasco that is Taiwan traffic. Also read this excellent analysis of the impact of land use laws on driving. Here are 2 paragraghs I like (from 2 different posts of his) that help explain:

Certainly the drivers education and enforcement systems are daft here. Certainly people do not know the rules. Certainly there is no ethic of civil society that compels individuals to account for the needs of others. But the Taiwanese are not essentially evil or essentially stupid. None of the aforementioned can occur withoutthat most basic of needs, space, being able to respond to the requirements of Taiwan's nascent civil society. And I fear that until it does, civil society will not be able to fully blossom on the Beautiful Island. As long as Taiwan's land use laws encourage an artificial density of human activity, it will not benefit individuals to behave as though civic society existed.

In most of our home cultures, to impose on others is an impoliteness. But in Taiwan, politeness runs in the other direction: when someone else imposes on you, you're supposed to give way. That's politeness. Probably everyone here has noticed the incredible difficulty that Taiwanese have in saying "no." Their definition of politeness is different than ours, and the result is the incredible tolerance they have for foreigners.

This is the tofu delivery at our favorite local vegi restaurant on Tai Yuan - the same morning.