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’l

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.