Scooter City

Own the center line. That bus’ll run suicide across three lanes of traffic to make that left-turn light. Any cab could squeal backwards a hundred meters in reverse to beat out the other man coming up fast for that fare you’re passing. Keep the left-lane open, so you can knock your speed up to a sprint when the coolie truck’s clutch problem threatens to box you in or some Lexus can’t make up whether or not to turn right a block ahead. Snow hare, you’ve got to be quick.

I had a dream shortly after buying my scooter that I was back home again, lost, riding past fresh green lawns on a sun-soaked afternoon. I couldn’t make sense of what I was doing, trying hard to straddle the middle of the narrow city block, dodging around cars that weren’t there, racing the same Taipei shuffle on Milwaukee lanes. I was certain that the police would soon be on me, but I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t slow down. The wheel was wobbling - and I feared if I slowed up it’d come clean off.

If you haven’t seen it, it might be a tough thing to imagine, the number of scooters in Taipei city. In rush hour, they easily outnumber cars ten-to-one. It’s an institution, the puttering steed of the salary-man masses, like their riders worn long with heavy use, worked for every ounce of oomph they’ve got, packed in with just enough space to breathe. Despite the similarities, like owners who resemble their pets, it’d be foolish to try and draw some soul of a people message from the scooter’s total dominance of the city. For most people, driving one was a last resort.

A scooter’s hard to love. Heavy and unweildy, even a nice new Vespa looks crummy ankle-deep in the four-stroke haze of a thousand Yamahas. They’ve tiny wheels, pudgy black donuts, and you ride them with your knees together, like you have to take a leak. I always splayed my feet out, let them slide into the scooter’s nose in a slacker stretch, but even that couldn’t make this look cool. None of the power, speed, or excitement of a motorcycle, and all of the danger.

The rain’s the most miserable part. That rumbling, caustic mob of scooters sitting at the top of the red light’s like a drain clog, their massive raingear slick with road spatter, secretaries’ bare feet idling on the asphalt while their high-heels dangle at one side. That’s what makes Taipei ‘Scooter City’ in a real way, and not in some quaint, “did-you-know-they-wear-wooden-shoes-here” sort of way: that their tiny 3-stroke engines grind the air around you to shreds, and that it never stops, even in the all too frequent land-squalls. Rain or shine, the scooter parade never takes off. I’ve ridden mine in at least a half-dozen typhoons.

I could write an Ode to the Scooter, but like everything in Taipei, that would really just be an Ode to Convenience and Cost-Effectiveness, hardly subjects to rouse and stir. The scooter can’t be admired. Not even the split-eared charms of the street dogs whose heads I daily pat can be gifted to the lowly scooter. Instead, like workhorses the world over, they could perhaps twist pity into something nearing respect.

So, here’s how it works: into the same sort of congested traffic you’ll find in any densely-populated city, empty a hundred thousand swarming hornets and let them find their way down every crack and between every open space, trailing one another like water through weakening dams. In a city where no one gives each other that “personal bubble” I remember diagrammed in baby blue on my driver’s ed. bulletin board, this frantic addition tips the traffic scale from ‘manageable’ to ‘crazytime.’

The alternative, however, of all these people driving cars, would be a gridlocked city. Since Taipei’s actual square-mileage leaves little room for more traffic, zipping from one end to the other on something we see as a toy Stateside not only makes sense, it keeps the place from turning into what I saw in Bangkok and Tianjin - honking queues of cars jumbled together like fallen dominoes.

Back when I was among the throng, before an accident killed my scooter (which was then stolen), my students all told me I was crazy. At last I had a big one, an all-too-close accident which every rider is either on one side of the other, some tried to make me eat humble pie. Nodding knowledgeably to me in my sling, they went on as though their months of cliched warnings had been prescient and not just conventional wisdom.

Those students are still wrong, scar or no. I wasn’t crazy; the whole city is nuts - frayed from nose to tail from thousands of scooters let loose like figurative marbles in a sick man’s head. And why be sane in a town gone mad?