Traffic around the world: Taiwan 2 (Taiwan)

I’d personally witnessed a massive traffic jam at the biggest roundabout in Taipei, when my bus was caught up in it for some three hours.  

It was a huge roundabout, with the radial roads feeding into it being multiple-laned both sides.  (You can google it under “biggest roundabout in Taipei” or “Ren’ai Road and Dunhua South Road roundabout in Taipei 台北仁愛路敦化南路圓環” and see the aerial view of this monstrosity for yourself.)  In the middle of the roundabout was a grassed-over piece of land about the size of a football pitch, if not bigger, and planted in the centre, a raised lookout pavilion with a traffic policeman monitoring the situation.

The standard highway code rule about roundabouts is:  traffic approaching a roundabout will slow down and only enter it if there’s enough room.  Well, this is for most other countries, but as that journalist had discovered in his research (see blog entryTraffic around the world:  Taiwan 1), Taiwan drivers go by their own instincts—one can’t even say “by their own rules” here, as it’s totally anarchic with them.

The drivers in the radial roads would squeeze in, even when the space in the roundabout was only big enough for the front half of the car, or maybe even just a bumper.  In a way, I can see the thinking behind this:  as the traffic was so dense, there would never come a time when the gap was big enough for the whole car to get in.

In the UK, if this happens, the driver in the roundabout would let the squeezer-in get in, by not moving forward.  Taiwan drivers, however, are too pig-headed—with a strong element of face involved here, I suspect—to give way to the cheeky chappie who has the audacity to cut in, so the car already in the roundabout inched forward and totally trapped the squeezer-in’s car.  However, what he didn’t seem to realise, until it was too late, was:  with the nose of the squeezer-in’s car stuck between his car and the one in front of him, he himself couldn’t move forward either.  A split second of yielding would’ve meant everyone being able to move, but these bloody-minded drivers seemed more intent on teaching the perpetrators a lesson, even to the extent of cutting off their own nose to spite their face.

Now, imagine this same scenario happening simultaneously at every single one of the radial road junctions, and you have a massive gridlock, with nobody able to move, literally, even an inch.  This was what happened on the day my bus was stuck in the traffic for three hours.

Cars started to honk, drivers started to stick their heads out of their windows and shout, cursing, swearing and waving their fists.  

The noise drew the attention of the traffic policeman in the pavilion to the stalemate.  He looked around the full 360°, and saw that there was a gridlock at every single junction of the roundabout.  He climbed down and walked all the way across his green island up to one of these stalemate sites, to assess at close quarters how much room there might be for manoeuvre, and who should move to allow whom to inch in or out.  The policeman had to climb over bonnets in some places, so tightly packed together were some of the cars that he couldn’t even squeeze a leg in between car bumpers.

The policeman went round all the junctions, and when he’d found a less tight spot, he’d direct the inching, car by car, junction by junction, stretch by stretch of the roundabout.  Sometimes, he had to walk back down a radial road to see if he could find a gap there, and if so—which could be a few cars away from the roundabout—he’d get the driver to inch back, then the one in front of him to inch back, and so on until he reached the squeezer-in at the roundabout, so that the squeezer-in could then inch back (out of the roundabout) and let the pig-headed driver move on.  Sometimes, once he’d got the roundabout car in front of the squeezer-in to move forward, the policeman would let the squeezer-in get in fully.

Three hours later, my bus was able to move towards the roundabout.  Still, the delay was worth it, as it provided an interesting experience witnessing at first hand what Taiwan drivers are like.

(Taiwan, 1975)