Cyclists around the country enjoyed Car-Free Day yesterday, which gave them a taste of what it was once like when bicycles ruled the road. But just like Cinderella’s ball, the dream ended at midnight. For the rest of the year, cyclists must live in a state of limbo, neither fish nor fowl, without the rights of either pedestrians or vehicles.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) has declared that its Directorate General of Highways “will cooperate in establishing standards for road layouts in Taiwan in which bicycle lanes must be included when building roads as a basis for road construction by all civil engineering departments and companies in future.” But is this kind of blanket policy really what cyclists need?
Bicycle lane planning in Taiwan faces several problems. Traffic layout in urban areas should put people first when prioritizing road use by different kinds of vehicles. Consideration needs to be given to how much space should be allocated for cars and how much for public transport, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians. Existing traffic conditions and volumes of automobile traffic, however, should not be the sole standards for setting road use priorities because circumstances can change.
From a humanistic and environmental point of view, sidewalks for pedestrians should be given top priority, followed by provision for buses, trams and bicycles. In reality, the car remains king of the road. Now the ministry has set a blanket rule based on a fledgling model for urban transport, authorities in smaller towns and rural areas will throw up their hands and say: “How are we going to squeeze in the proposed extra lanes for bicycles? This will have to wait until whole areas are replanned and rebuilt.”
If the ministry wants to promote bicycle lanes, they must be integrated in a sustainable public transportation policy. The MOTC should cooperate with the Ministry of the Interior’s Construction and Planning Agency on a policy that promotes the participation of local governments. The network of bike lanes in different cities should be connected, rather than just opening up new roads. If road construction merely follows MOTC standards, engineers will only consider bike lanes within the priorities set by those standards.
Simply put, if a provincial highway should be 30m wide, engineers will only consider road use within that scope, and Taiwan would soon have a network of bike lanes following major roads. But bike lanes should meet the requirements of bicycles and their riders. They don’t need to rigidly follow the road network, since slope angle and curvature requirements are very different from those of roads for cars. They also do not need to run alongside main roads, forcing cyclists to ride alongside massive buses, gravel trucks and more. Surely this cannot be the intent, nor is it the kind of bike lane that bike enthusiasts want.
Bike lanes make up the first link in a chain of energy savings and carbon emission reduction measures. Getting more people out of gas-guzzling vehicles and onto bikes is also a public health policy. Focusing on what cyclists want and need when planning and building new bike paths would also provide a way to reform the bureaucratic system so that it focuses on the public’s wants and needs rather than itself.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) has formally announced his intention to stand for permanent party chairman. He has decided that he is the right person to steer the fledgling third force in Taiwan’s politics through the challenges it would certainly face in the post-Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) era, rather than serve in a caretaker role while the party finds a more suitable candidate. Huang is sure to secure the position. He is almost certainly not the right man for the job. Ko not only founded the party, he forged it into a one-man political force, with himself
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