Driving in Taipei

I'm sure bellyaching about the driving in Taiwan is quite cliche but I'll at least make some comments about it since many ex-pats may be debating whether or not to get a car here.. My company is outside of Taipei and the MRT line out that way is not complete yet (2013) and since my wife will be working in Taipei, one of us needs a car. Part of the whole point of coming here was to enjoy a big international city and the excitement that comes with it so we have chosen to live in Shilin which is equally convenient to MRT, highway, and bus line up through Tian Mu.

Therefore, I will be commuting 22km by car to work. I have never driven in the Far East before. When my company sends us to Korea or Taiwan, we are highly discouraged from attempting to drive. They have no problem paying for taxis and limos to take us wherever we need to go. But since I'm here for the long haul, I must take on the task of driving.

If there is one succinct rule of thumb I would give about driving in Taiwan it's, Do not look at the lines on the road, ever. Like the points in Who's Line Is It Anyway, they just don't matter. You know how when you are speeding through a corner with a jersey barrier on the side, you're not supposed to look at the wall, otherwise you'll hit it? Same thing, follow the lines and you will hit something, because nobody else follows the lines. Cars and scooters intertwine and basically follow the path of least resistance down the road. If there is an opening in front of you, you take it.

The layout of the roads by the traffic engineers is merely a suggestion. On my way home from work I am on a main road, you need to make a left to get to the highway, the road has four lanes, 2 marked to turn left, 2 marked to go straight. During rush hour, all four lanes turn left. And once you come around that corner, all four lanes of traffic need to fit back into two lanes. The crazy thing is, it all seems to work. Very rarely do you hear a horn honk, people just let each other in, and I haven't yet seen a real wreck. A couple rear-end fender benders, but that's it.

One possible reason that there aren't accidents on top of accidents is there is extensive traffic monitoring, remote speed cameras, stoplight cameras, and cops on the side of the road running camera based radar traps. You get a ticket in the mail and you pay it at 7-11. You do EVERYTHING at 7-11 (more on that in the future). I didn't quite realize the photo enforcement scenario until I read it on someone else's blog a couple days ago. Now I know why every so often, the GPS makes a "BONG" noise and something red in Chinese flashes on the screen. It's probably alerting me to a known traffic cam. I guess I'll be paying a visit to 7-11 soon.

Speaking of GPS, before leaving the U.S. I wanted to have a GPS in hand that would work in Taiwan. Since Garmin is based in Taiwan, I figured that would be a good choice. I previously had a TomTom, which was OK, but support is nearly non-existent. After buying a Nuvi 765, I was surprised to find out that Garmin refuses to sell me a Taiwan map for a U.S. serialized Garmin. There are ways to pirate maps, and I am not advocating piracy, but I attempted to pay for the map and my money was denied so I boarded the plane with Garmin in hand. Be warned, there are Chinese maps and English maps for Taiwan. If you are reading this blog, you probably want the English maps. Taiwan City Navigator 8.63B works well,  if you can get it.

I noticed in my rental car agreement that it would come with a GPS so I had that as a fallback plan not knowing if mine would actually work. Upon delivery of the rental car, I looked through the favorites stored in the Nuvi 205 and it already had my apartment and my office stored in its database, nice! I used it to make my way out to the office and it worked fine. After using it throughout Taipei for a couple weeks I have noticed a few issues which may be generically applied to GPS in Taipei:

• Inputting an address can be an issue due to the different forms of romanizing Chinese, that it, converting from Kanji characters into words that look more like English. There were different standards used which result in different spellings, Chung, Zhong, and Jhong can all be the same thing as far as I can tell so when you attempt input an address, it may be spelled differently than what the Garmin will recognize.
• Another issue is that the Garmin does not treat Taipei as the  "city", you must further input what we would refer to as the neighborhood, for example, Shilin, which in Garmin is spelled Shihlin (note above bullet point). Often you will find an address in a guidebook that will not specify which neighborhood it is in so you may have to guess. One saving grace is the POI database is quite extensive and you can find most things, from big department stores to small mom & pop coffee shops.
• Navigation itself can be troublesome. First of all, the technology of GPS is not accurate enough to always figure out what street you are on in Taipei because the streets are so close together. A variance of 30 feet can easily put you on 3 different parallel roads.
• With narrow streets, tall buildings, and cloud cover, maintaining a signal can be difficult. It also takes time to lock a signal and when coming out of a parking garage right into traffic, you may be on your own for a few turns until the GPS can acquire satellites. I have found the Garmin 765 to be much better than my old TomTom GO 700 in this sense. That TomTom would require you to sit still for a minute before getting a fix on your position. If I just drove out of my garage, I could cover 10 miles without locking because I could get that far before a long enough pause in my travels.
• Couple the previous 3 points together, and once you deviate from the intended route, the CPU speed in the GPS is sometimes not fast enough to easily get you back on track. By the time it recalculates the next route, you're already 3 turns past where it wanted you to go and you have to cross your fingers for a red light.

All in all, the GPS will get you to your destination. I also find it great for walking and the Garmin has a pedestrian mode. You can plan on visiting a certain neighborhood and load up some destinations from a guidebook and use the GPS to find you way around and most importantly, not get lost when you get twisted around in small narrow alleys. I'm hoping to soon replace the pedestrian value of the GPS with a smartphone and Google Maps. Unfortunately you can't get turn by turn directions in Taiwan via Google Maps on a phone yet.


If you can handle driving in New York or Boston, you should be OK in Taipei. If those places make you white knuckled, you will have a hard time, at least that's my opinion after a couple weeks driving here, I'm curious to see if that changes over time.