The Taiwanese Street

A lot gets said in the Western media these days about the "Arab street," an amporphous group of people in the Arab world who have hostile attitudes toward America and the West. But more dangeorus for an American in Taiwan is likely to be the Taiwanese street. And I mean, literally, the street.

Scooter mania is a fact of Taiwanese life. You see them everywhere. It sometimes seems as if every square inch of space not occupied by something else will soon be occupied by a scooter.

The scooters might not be so bad on their own. But combined with another aspect of Taiwanese street life, they can be hazardous. I refer to the general lack of what we would call sidewalks in America. To the extent that sidewalks exist in Taiwan, they are the underhangs of buildings, not definable sidewalks in the American sense. They often rise and fall abruptly as you walk along them, without ramps and without warning. And even these areas sometimes get clogged up by, you guessed it, scooters. So what is an intrepid pedestrian to do?

Often, walk in the street, vulnerable to oncoming (scooter) traffic.

The major hazard scooters pose to the pedestrian is their ability to come out of nowhere, very, very fast. For this reason alone, it's advisable not to jaywalk, even on a relatively empty side street. A scooter could be lurking just behind that seven-story building on the corner.

Fortunately, if you go to the nearest corner, you do find some help in the form of traffic and walk/don't walk signs. In Taiwan, the walk/don't walk signs are particularly amusing, and convenient. Amusing, because the "walk" symbol is actually animated, and actually speeds up his walking toward the end of the light cycle. And convenient, because, as soon as a traffic light changes, a count-down above the walk symbol tells you exactly how much time you have to get across the street. So, unlike in New York, I never have any doubts about just how long I have to get across before I risk becoming roadkill.

Which leads to the question...why can't American cities do things like this? The technology can't possibly be THAT complicated. Living here, I start to realize how many little rip-off aspects there are to living in New York. Not just the housing. Not just the poor service on the subway. But little things like walk/don't walk signs with no countdown and bus stops that have nowhere to sit. Why?