Land of Oz

Traffic

Traffic is crazy here. It's a little like a cross between Mad Max and Bladerunner. I read in yesterday's paper that Taiwan in the second most densly populated nation on earth - second only to Bangledesh. And most of those folks seem to be driving either cars or scooters. The scooters here are like a cloud of mosquitoes at every traffic light. They have their own lane (a tiny one on the right) and their own space at the front of the line at traffic lights, but they tend to fit where they can.

I still haven't quite figured out left turns at traffic lights yet. It's kind of cross between "if you see a space take it" and "my car is bigger than your car" and then go. Right turns aren't a whole lot more controlled. Basically if you can find a space, you take it. The strange thing is, it seems to work. I haven't really seen an accident in the almost two weeks we've been here.

Emergency vehicles here don't have any specific priority. They have lights and sirens, but have to make their way through the traffic. The other traffic doesn't move, slow or otherwise get out of the way.

There aren't a lot of really tiny vehicles here - other than the scooters. Most cars are the larger Toyotas, Hondas and Mitsubishis with a fairly large assortment of 200 and 300 series Mercedes. There are many SUV style vehicles - not the huge American styles, but still large and a lot of minivan types. I've seen a lot of Fords but only 3 GM cars - a big Chrysler, a Firebird and a beatup rusty Cavalier. No wonder GM is tanking in the states. In fact, I've seen more VW New Beetles than GM cars in total.

The biggest surprise is the price of gasoline. It's around NT$24 per liter which works out to be a bit cheaper than Canada and about the same as the US. (32 New Taiwan dollars NT$ = 1 United States dollar).