Driving Etiquette - The Far East

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Taiwan

The traffic in Taiwan can only be described as chaotic.

An interesting phenomenom is that most intersections have a series of white lines painted on the road itself, parallel to the kerb, and extending from one side of the road to the other. They look suspiciously like the lines we'd call a pedestrian crossing, only they must mean something else. Probably something like 'objects bigger and made of more metal have right of way'.

When we learn how to drive, we are told to leave at least 2 - 3 car lengths between us and the car in front. None of us have been angelic about this, but in Taiwan this would mean 2 - 3 cars from the next lane would cut in, as well as 2 - 3 of the cars riding in between lanes.

This is bad enough, but if you happen to be in the middle lane of three, this would mean that 8 - 12 cars would be jostling into the spots.

And then there's the scooters...

It's actually really quite simple - the laws of physics have been waived so that the laws of traffic can be waived accordingly. This means that when 9 - 12 cars, plus a couple of dozen scooters converge on a single lane, they get away with it because there is an anomaly that allows multiple material objects to occupy the same point in the space-time continuum.


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