Rules of the Road

My father-in law flat out can't drive. He hits the breaks when everyone around him is speeding up. He makes wrong turns. He often is honked at, and is inevitably overtaken by nearly every car that pulls up behind him (which is, to say, many drivers). There are many narrow two-way streets in Taiwan that require a car to move towards the curb to let another pass by. He turns onto one of these streets and notices a car already at full speed coming towards us and says, "that car was here first, it should wait first". The other driver must have thought we were playing a game of chicken. My in law didn't notice anything odd about the other driver's sudden swerve out of the way. Screeching tire noises mean nothing to this man.

I don't blame my father in-law, really. He has a few things working against him. One is that he didn't learn to drive until 5 years ago. His home is within walking distance to work, so he never needed to drive, and today, he only drives occasionally on trips to the countryside, or for shopping at the RT Mart (the Taiwanese version of Wu-Mart, while Wu-Mart is the Chinese version of Wal-Mart - try harder, people). So very little driving experience is one factor.

The other factor is endogenous to big cities such as Taipei. Like any other major city with heavy traffic on the city streets - New York and Boston come to mind - people drive a bit recklessly. There are few universal rules you need to follow:
1 - never hesitate or else everyone will pass you and you will get more flustered
2 - never leave more than 2 feet of space between you and the car in front of you or else you WILL get cut off

And that's pretty much it as I see it. Everything else is every-man-for-himself where the most aggressive person not to get into an accident is rewarded. Now there are two main differences between driving in the east coast US cities and driving in Taipei:
1 - There has been an emphasis in the US to give priority to pedestrians. That's not the case in Taiwan. If you step out onto the street, cars will drive faster to pass you.
2 - The scooters. Oh how I hate the scooters.

I had a chance to drive around the city and it's pretty obvious that the scooters follow almost no rules. They drive between cars, on the shoulder, and at a stop light, they drive past all the cars if you give them space.

What I found most interesting is that I was honked at only once in the hour I drove. Now I'm pretty sure I scared the hell out of a lot of scooters and other vehicles because I like to claim my territory. Scooters like to drive besides you in your own lane. I like to push them into the line of parked cars along the side of the road. Cars would try to cut me off, but would find themselves stuck when I didn't allow space between me and the car in front of me. I also liked crossing three lanes of traffic to make left turns. And none of this extremely aggressive driving elicited a honk. Only when I slowed down well before my turn because I was unsure of where I was did I get the horn.

So I think Taiwan encourages reckless driving, while it penalizes conservative careful driving. For my father-in-law, he never stood a chance because he would start out by driving conservatively, get honked at, and then he would speed up and miss his turns.