This all came to a head in 2022 when CNN published this article calling Taiwan a living hell because of its abysmal road safety record. At the time, road deaths in

Taiwan were the highest they had been since 2013. Every single day five pedestrians were injured or killed in Taipei City alone and about half of those deaths were of people over the age of 65. The CNN article became headline news for weeks as Taiwanese people and foreigners alike would share their stories about the dangerous streets.

Or like when they're turning. Like that. Like that. Just like that. Exactly. Like that's so reckless.

And I was told by my friends in Taiwan that this resulted in the acceleration of many safe streets initiatives especially in Taipei. So while I was in Asia recently I decided to go to Taiwan for a few days to see some old friends to eat some great food and to see if the streets of Taipei were still a living hell. And I'm happy to say that some things have gotten a lot better. But it's not there yet.

The last time I was in Taiwan was in 2012 for Computex of course. So it's been a while but the one thing I noticed immediately the first time I stepped outside was that cars would actually stop when I was crossing the street. Even moped riders and taxi drivers were waiting for people to cross. This would never ever happen in the past. Not even close. Drivers used to aggressively push through the intersection while people were trying to cross. I was told that this was due to a new law that was introduced recently where all motor vehicles have to stay at least three meters away from anybody in a pedestrian crossing. Steep fines were introduced for any drivers failing to yield and most importantly those laws were actually being enforced. Oh and I also noticed that the garbage trucks play different music than they did before. One of the other things that Taipei has been trying to fix is a lack of sidewalks. Many sidewalks in Taipei were either too narrow or there was no sidewalk at all. I saw a few roads like this one where the sidewalk had been widened and even bike lanes installed which was nice to see. I also never once saw a moped driver driving down the sidewalk, never mind a taxi, which used to be a common occurrence. I went to this street near our old apartment that I specifically remember having terrible sidewalks but unfortunately it was still the same and the sidewalks were still too narrow. But just like in Japan the nicest places to walk in Taipei are often on the really narrow streets which are usually referred to as lanes here. Each lane is labeled with the closest street number and the name of the road it connects to. In Taipei the lanes and narrow streets are where some of the best stuff can be found too. You will find lots of small businesses, food stalls, convenience stores and other interesting urban amenities like this local park and playground. But sadly the dumpling place that I used to go to on my way home from work was closed when I walked by. I noticed that many of the streets were now painted with a green stripe and labeled as a sidewalk in an attempt to make them safer. These predated the CNN article but they weren't here when I lived in Taipei and I'm not totally convinced that these are an improvement. On wider streets it makes sense to designate some of the space as a sidewalk but these painted areas were supposed to be only temporary until they were replaced with physical sidewalks but as they say there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

A street this wide should definitely have a real sidewalk and those sidewalks should be a lot bigger than this little green stripe. But on narrower streets I don't think these painted areas are that helpful. I recently made a video about why the narrow streets in Japan are so great and one of the things I mentioned is that because there's so little car traffic people can just walk down the middle of the street. Japan does sometimes have white lines like these to indicate where cars should drive but people are still encouraged to walk wherever they want. But if you paint a very clear area and label it as sidewalk as is done here then it implies that drivers get the rest of the space and will get upset with you if you are walking in their space. I think on narrow streets the real solution for road safety isn't painted sidewalks but rather to do what Japan has done which is to significantly reduce car volumes.

These streets should never be used by through traffic. The only cars that should ever be here are those of the people coming from or going to a destination in this neighborhood. This can be done by making these areas a maze of one-way streets or they can install modal filters that prevent cars from passing but allow people walking and cycling to go through like is common in the Netherlands. This is complicated in Taipei because there are so many people driving mopeds who would probably just go through the modal filters anyway but as long as they're driving slowly this may not be a problem. The other major difference between Taiwanese and Japanese streets is parking. Japan has strict laws against street parking so their streets are almost completely free of parked cars. But these small streets in Taiwan are often full of parked cars and mopeds which makes the street much less inviting to people walking. A lot of these cars should be moved to off-street parking and to allow more space on these narrow lanes and thankfully some of that is happening already. I took this video of my typical walk home from our local metro station in 2011. Notice how much car parking there was on this street. Now it looks like this which is a huge improvement. And one thing that's much better about the streets in Taipei versus Tokyo is the trees. The streets of Taipei have trees everywhere which makes them look so much nicer. They also provide shade and the temperature is noticeably cooler on a street like this with good tree coverage. The main roads have far fewer trees unfortunately but one thing I really like about Taipei is how the shops are set back from the road and covered by the buildings above. This provides excellent protection from the sun and the rain, two things that are very common in Taiwan. I think that a lot of other hot countries could learn something from the design of the streets and roads in Taipei. I did not visit in the hottest time of the year but it was still around 30 degrees every day that I was visiting. Yet I almost never felt too hot because the sidewalks were covered on the main roads, the trees provided shade in the lanes and the metro was air-conditioned. So I like the way these areas are covered from the elements but one of my major complaints when we lived here was that the sidewalks were often really uneven. It was common to see huge jumps in the level of the sidewalk like this which were not just annoying, they were a tripping hazard. So I was really happy to see that a lot of these had been smoothed out with ramps like this. It was still not perfect but it's so much better than how it was. For this visit I decided to stay in the Xinyi district of Taipei. I know, I know, Xinyi is nothing like the rest of Taipei, never mind the rest of Taiwan, but it's always been the district with the best urban design and it's a really easy place to stay as a tourist. Xinyi is the financial district of Taipei. It's where you'll find the offices of major international and Taiwanese financial and tech companies, high-end shopping and the iconic skyscraper Taipei 101. And I booked a hotel that was directly across the street. As soon as I exited the metro station it was clear that this place had definitely changed since I was last here. First of all there was a new bike lane and people were actually using it, something that was almost unheard of when we lived in the city. And next to the metro station exit was this u-bike station with lots of bikes. U-bike is a typical docked bike share system like you'll find in many other cities but I was genuinely impressed by how many docks there were. Apparently there are already over 1,300 docks and there are plans to expand that to over 2,000 in the next few years. What's nice is that bikes can be unlocked with the same card that is used for public transit. But I didn't ride a bike while I was visiting Taipei for reasons that will become obvious later. But regardless I prefer taking the metro anyway. That's part of the reason why this channel is called Not Just Bikes. The other parts of Xinyi were more or less the same. This district has always had the best urbanism to begin with and it has always had the most financial investment as well. Still it was nice to walk through the pedestrianized areas and they were even better at night with lights and decorations everywhere. Areas like these are the best parts of Xinyi. Though this giant car ad is maybe not the best use of space in a pedestrian area. The inside of Taipei 101 was just as I remembered it. Basically a glitzy shopping mall with high-end brands where international electronics companies sell overpriced products back to the Taiwanese people who designed them. For a short time my company's offices were in Taipei 101 and apparently it was super fun during earthquakes. But it's kept safe thanks to a huge mass damper system that keeps the building from swaying too much during earthquakes and typhoons. And you can even go see it as a tourist and have the damper babies teach you about skyscraper engineering.

Taiwan is like the only country that would anthropomorphize a tuned mass damper and I love it. Xinyi has some places that are really nice but other than taller trees this is the same as it was 15 years ago. I was really hoping that some of these roads would have been narrowed to make more room for bigger sidewalks, parquets, or bike lanes but no they're just as wide as ever. There are some pedestrian bridges through this area but a few of them were closed for repair when I was there so it meant waiting a long time at stoplights in order to cross. But to be honest I didn't spend too much time in Xinyi when we lived here because it sometimes just feels like you're walking through an upscale shopping mall. The biggest thing I noticed is that there were a lot more people cycling. When we lived here it was too dangerous to walk never mind ride a bicycle. But this time I saw lots of people riding bicycles around the city.

This bicycle path was installed decades ago but it was actually in use and the

U-bike station was a welcome addition. Some of the new bike lanes were pretty good like this one. Here the road was narrowed slightly to make room for a wider sidewalk and a bicycle lane which is great. There were unfortunately no protected intersections but that's not really surprising because they're still pretty rare outside of the Netherlands. Though even at driveways the sidewalk and bike lane would drop down rather than staying at sidewalk level which is a bit disappointing on newly designed infrastructure. Other bike lanes were not so well designed and would suddenly end for no apparent reason. The worst example was this one which runs right into the stairs of a metro station which is really frustrating to see because there's plenty of room to build something better if they had taken away even just one of the eight lanes for motor vehicles. In general the roads are extremely wide in Taipei not just in terms of the number of lanes but also the width of those lanes so there should be lots of space to build proper bicycle lanes. But instead most new bike lanes take space away from the already narrow sidewalks rather than taking any space away from cars. The most objectionable bike path I saw was on Ren'ai Road. We used to live here and I still remember the Chinese for the address Taipei

Ren'ai Road 3.41. Apologies for my terrible accent I promise it used to be better. It's almost impossible to capture just how large this road is on camera because there are so many trees that obscure the view. But you can see here that there are two lanes one way and then a median with trees then another two lanes one of which is a bus lane then another median then another bus lane in a traffic lane then another median and then another two lanes. If you look really far in the distance you can see just how far away the other side of the road is on this pedestrian crossing. So there is no shortage of space on Ren'ai

Road and yet when a bike path was put right in front of our old apartment it was put here on the sidewalk so that people cycling and people walking are in conflict with one another. It's so frustrating that they couldn't even take just one of the many car lanes to build a proper bicycle path. This is a common theme across Taipei. There are some small moves to make the city more bicycle friendly but they're only doing it where it doesn't inconvenience drivers. One of the challenges of building cycling infrastructure though is that Taipei is a city of mopeds. They are absolutely everywhere. Around every corner you will find lines of parked mopeds and at every stoplight you will see a large group of moped riders. Taipei is what Amsterdam would look like if all of the bicycles were replaced with mopeds. It's interesting that mopeds in Taipei are treated very similarly to the way bicycles are in many North American cities. Where you might find a bike box at a stoplight in North America you'll find a moped box in Taipei for the same reasons. This makes mopeds more visible at stoplights and it allows moped riders to do two-phase hook turns for safer left turns at large intersections. There are even moped only lanes along some major roads the same way you might find bike lanes in other cities. These lanes also allow people cycling to use them but most people choose to ride on the sidewalk instead because mopeds and bicycles do not always mix well. The

Netherlands sometimes has problems with moped riders driving too quickly in the bike lanes. In most of the country the blue plate Snorfietsen are allowed to ride in bike lanes but these are supposed to be capped at a maximum speed of 25 kilometers per hour. However approximately 100% of all Snorfiets riders have illegally removed those speed limiters which is why a few years ago Amsterdam banned all types of mopeds from the majority of bike lanes in the city. Moped riders now use the roadway with all other motor vehicles and the speed limit on most streets in Amsterdam was recently lowered to 30 kilometers per hour. So I'm used to seeing mopeds quite often but in Taipei they drive a lot faster. I would guess somewhere between 50 to 80 kilometers per hour.

Moped riders definitely present challenges for road safety because they drive very fast, their movements are hard to predict and they sometimes also ride on sidewalks and in pedestrian areas.

Also almost all of these mopeds are gasoline powered so they are very loud and there is a constant hum of moped noise on the streets of Taipei. Coming directly from Japan it was really jarring just how much traffic there was in Taipei. Tokyo has many very wide roads like this one but there isn't a lot of car traffic whereas in Taipei the roads are busy most of the time and widening the roads hasn't made the traffic any better. Which is expected of course because decades of research has proven that there's no solution to car traffic except viable alternatives to driving. So one of the worst things you can do as a city is to let your buses get stuck in traffic and scenes like this are way too common in Taipei. There's no excuse for this bus sitting in traffic when there is more than enough room for a bus lane. Taipei has some dedicated bus lanes like this one which are great but if they're going to reduce traffic congestion then they need to build a lot more of them so that it can be faster to take the bus than to sit in traffic. But while Taipei may not be building enough dedicated bus lanes they are investing heavily in their metro system. I was absolutely blown away by how many new metro stations there were since we left in 2011. Like the metro station in front of my hotel wasn't there when we lived in

Taipei. For reference this is what the metro map looked like in 2011 and this is what it looks like today. I always used to have to take a taxi out to the airport when we lived here so the new Airport Express line opened in 2017 was very welcome. And I've seen USB chargers on transit but never Qi wireless charging pads. You can even check in your bags for your flight in the city before boarding the MTR. This should really be the norm in cities everywhere.

I visited my old metro station. It was great to see the new connection to the expanded Zhonghe Xinlu line. This would have saved me so much time getting to work if it existed in 2010. And Taipei hasn't stopped building either. There are an additional three new metro projects that are currently under construction. It's pretty rare to see a city that is constantly building new metro lines the way Taipei is. It means that the metro system is consistently getting better every year but it's also one of the best ways to keep construction costs down. With constant construction a city can build local expertise in building transit and when one project is done those experienced people can immediately move on to the next project. But when your city only builds new rapid transit once every decade or two every project is like baby's first transit project which requires lots of expensive international contractors and results in lots of costly amateur mistakes that make it impossible to deliver on schedule. Eglinton LRT in Toronto. The MRT also connects in several places to

Taiwan high-speed rail which can take you to other cities on the island at up to 300 kilometers per hour. The trains are reminiscent of the Japanese

Shinkansen both on the outside and on the inside. There are trains departing frequently with about 160 trains traveling in both directions each day and with an on-time performance of over 99%. I wasn't in town for very long though so

I only had time to go one stop on the high-speed train. Most of my travel was on the MRT and I was able to get everywhere I wanted to go by metro while

I was visiting. Well except my old office but I'll get to that later. The system is made up of a mix of underground and above-ground lines as well as a few gondolas thrown in for good measure. I know some people don't like elevated rail but I think it's nice to be able to see the city and not be stuck underground. Plus it's often cheaper to build than underground metro lines which means more transit is built which is a good thing right? Like most metro systems you can pay for your trip by tapping a reloadable smart card but I opted for a 72 hour travel pass which comes as this funny circular plastic thing but it opens the fare gates the same way. The MRT trains are spacious clean and frequent. Most stations have platform screen doors which are safer but can also prevent delays caused by garbage falling on the tracks. The position of doors and where to wait is clearly marked and all trains have level boarding which makes getting on and off very easy. The signage is really good in the stations and on the trains too and at interchange stations it is very common to have a cross-platform transfer. I love it when transit is designed well. All transit should be as good as it is in Taipei. One thing I don't like so much about the MRT though is that a lot of the metro station exits bring you right out to very wide busy roads. This is something that also bothered me about Montreal where metro riders get out along some of the worst roads and stroads in the whole city. I would like to see Taipei building more metro exits that go directly to the smaller streets especially pedestrianized streets because wide roads are not useful to people walking out of the metro and plus it's hard to get hit by a car when there aren't any cars. One example of this done well is at Zhongshan metro station. This place has seen a nice upgrade since I was last here with this recently renovated linear park connecting directly to the metro station. It is much nicer to exit here rather than at the side of a busy road. There's this open area here that can be set up for events and a little farther down is this entrance to the underground Book Street, a walkway under the park with lots of independent bookstores, cafes and cozy places to read. Taipei has some really great pedestrian and low car streets too like this one in Wanhua and if you get out at the right metro exit it takes you right here to the famous Rainbow Road crossing. It was so funny to see people holding up traffic so that they could get a photo on the rainbow. Another benefit of the new three meter rule for pedestrian crossings I guess. Wanhua is a great neighborhood. There's the Red House