Left-turning scooters colliding with approaching vehicles leads to more injuries and deaths than left-turning vehicles colliding with scooters, a Taipei Medical University study showed.
Although scooter riders in the past few years have called for the removal of the two-stage left turn rule, scooters that directly turn left without using a hook turn tend to sustain more injuries in an accident, the study showed.
In a hook turn, motorcyclists wishing to turn left must first go to the right-hand side of the intersection with the road they wish to turn onto and wait in a designated spot for the light to turn green.
Image courtesy of Taipei MedicalUniversity
A research team led by Pai Chih-wei (白志偉), a professor in the university’s Graduate Institute of Injury Prevention and Control, examined data from the National Taiwan Crash Database and the National Health Insurance Research Data from 2003 to 2015, comparing the severity of injuries sustained by scooter riders in two types of traffic accidents.
Compared with being hit by a left-turning vehicle crossing into a scooter’s right of way, crashes that occur as a result of a scooter entering a vehicle’s right of way results in an additional injury rate of 58 percent, 20 percent and 73 percent in the head, neck, and chest and abdomen respectively, the study showed.
A vehicle with the right of way is usually moving faster, so when hitting a motorcyclist, it tends to cause more serious injuries, with a death rate of 1.39 percent, according to the study.
Analyses using logistic regression models revealed that the combined chances of death and severe injuries in an accident where a vehicle has the right of way are 2.7 times higher than the other way around, it said.
Although data showed that more accidents involved a left-turning vehicle colliding with a scooter, the chances of severe injuries caused by this type of accident are much lower, it said.
Several cities and counties have reduced the number of intersections requiring hook turns due to complaints from scooter riders that those turns are time-consuming.
The study was published on the international journal Accident Analysis & Prevention in May last year.
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
RSS