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I worry the TRA (not high-speed) in Taiwan will collapse. It’s a separate system from the high-speed HSR system, and aside from Taipei, their stations are separ

I worry the TRA (not high-speed) in Taiwan will collapse. It’s a separate system from the high-speed HSR system, and aside from Taipei, their stations are separate and only loosely connected by buses or metro in Kaohsiung. It’s a shame, because the HSR can get from north to south in about two hours, but the stations are all outside the city centers. TRA stations are far more convenient, and the network is far more extensive, but Taiwan has a strong car culture. Despite an excellent rail system, many people will opt to sit bumper to bumper traffic on weekends and holidays. TRA has also been poorly managed and doesn’t have a great safety record compared to other developed nations. I worry that as more and more people want to demonstrate their new wealth by driving, ridership on TRA will fall, and without integration with HSR it can’t even serve as a feeder network and we’ll be stuck with a high-speed rail too far outside the cities to be useful without driving and parking at the station.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
> TRA stations are far more convenient, and the network is far more extensive, but Taiwan has a strong car culture. Despite an excellent rail system, many people will opt to sit bumper to bumper traffic on weekends and holidays. I think "car culture" is usually a good explanation for big picture decisions for transportation -- where society invests, how the government develops transportation-related policies, what people will protest locally against -- but a poor explanation for why people make day to day transportation decisions. Pretty much anytime you see people hardly using public transit (or biking or walking) in an area, you can zoom in and discover that, shocker of shockers, it really sucks in one or more ways. People are mostly pretty rational when it comes to those day-to-day decisions, I think. Yes, it may seem silly that people will drive their huge truck to their office job a mere mile and a half away, but if you zoom in, you find that even their residential neighborhood has huge, wide streets that people speed around in, making biking feel uncomfortable and dangerous. And when everyone else has huge trucks going fast, being in a huge truck does make you feel quite a bit safer. Another example, my hometown of the South SF bay area has excellent weather for biking, and the more populated areas are largely flat*, but biking there is still uncommon, and if you try to do so yourself you quickly discover why. It's largely unpleasant and very dangerous-feeling, with fragmented, quarter-assed infrastructure that often seems designed to try and kill you. Who the hell feels comfortable biking on painted bike lanes on Lawrence Expressway next to 50+ mph traffic, I'll never know. And what little infrastructure there is often randomly disappears, like bike lanes that just sort of curve into the sidewalk (and not even a sloped edge, so I'm not sure what they expect you to do there). I personally got hit twice by cars the last year before I moved to Munich, including once when my son was on my bike (police came out, but they didn't even bother ticketing the driver who t-boned by rear wheel, of course). * Yes, obviously there are hills around the valley, but most of the people and stuff is in the flat parts
- eloisius 5y ago
  That’s true to an extent, and one of the good reasons that people give is that even if it’s easier to take the train to Hualien than to drive, once there, you’ll need to rent a scooter for the weekend because local transit outside of the cities is limited to busses. That said, there are plenty of times that friends will want to drive, for the sake of driving around, to places where transit would do just fine. To me, it looks like the current generation is far wealthier than the last one, and being able to own and drive a car is a sign of having made it. Trains are awesome to me, having grown up in a place without public transit, but some of my friends act like riding TRA is more like a poverty decision. I may be reasoning from a too small a sample set of just my friends, but the voluntary gridlock weekends to go ‘camping’ drive me nuts.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  It’s hard to tell. Aichi has the highest private vehicle ownership in Japan per capita and in total, but people still commute using the train. About bicycles: In Japan hitting something with your car is an offense in itself. So, even if a cyclist or pedestrian is breaking traffic rules, if you hit them you will be liable to pay between 10-100% of their medical costs+damages.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

> TRA stations are far more convenient, and the network is far more extensive, but Taiwan has a strong car culture. Despite an excellent rail system, many people will opt to sit bumper to bumper traffic on weekends and holidays. I think "car culture" is usually a good explanation for big picture decisions for transportation -- where society invests, how the government develops transportation-related policies, what people will protest locally against -- but a poor explanation for why people make day to day transportation decisions. Pretty much anytime you see people hardly using public transit (or biking or walking) in an area, you can zoom in and discover that, shocker of shockers, it really sucks in one or more ways. People are mostly pretty rational when it comes to those day-to-day decisions, I think. Yes, it may seem silly that people will drive their huge truck to their office job a mere mile and a half away, but if you zoom in, you find that even their residential neighborhood has huge, wide streets that people speed around in, making biking feel uncomfortable and dangerous. And when everyone else has huge trucks going fast, being in a huge truck does make you feel quite a bit safer. Another example, my hometown of the South SF bay area has excellent weather for biking, and the more populated areas are largely flat*, but biking there is still uncommon, and if you try to do so yourself you quickly discover why. It's largely unpleasant and very dangerous-feeling, with fragmented, quarter-assed infrastructure that often seems designed to try and kill you. Who the hell feels comfortable biking on painted bike lanes on Lawrence Expressway next to 50+ mph traffic, I'll never know. And what little infrastructure there is often randomly disappears, like bike lanes that just sort of curve into the sidewalk (and not even a sloped edge, so I'm not sure what they expect you to do there). I personally got hit twice by cars the last year before I moved to Munich, including once when my son was on my bike (police came out, but they didn't even bother ticketing the driver who t-boned by rear wheel, of course). * Yes, obviously there are hills around the valley, but most of the people and stuff is in the flat parts

eloisius 5y ago
That’s true to an extent, and one of the good reasons that people give is that even if it’s easier to take the train to Hualien than to drive, once there, you’ll need to rent a scooter for the weekend because local transit outside of the cities is limited to busses. That said, there are plenty of times that friends will want to drive, for the sake of driving around, to places where transit would do just fine. To me, it looks like the current generation is far wealthier than the last one, and being able to own and drive a car is a sign of having made it. Trains are awesome to me, having grown up in a place without public transit, but some of my friends act like riding TRA is more like a poverty decision. I may be reasoning from a too small a sample set of just my friends, but the voluntary gridlock weekends to go ‘camping’ drive me nuts.
skhr0680 5y ago
It’s hard to tell. Aichi has the highest private vehicle ownership in Japan per capita and in total, but people still commute using the train. About bicycles: In Japan hitting something with your car is an offense in itself. So, even if a cyclist or pedestrian is breaking traffic rules, if you hit them you will be liable to pay between 10-100% of their medical costs+damages.