{"id":5224,"date":"2016-03-25T22:26:22","date_gmt":"2016-03-25T09:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/willandrewsdesign.com\/?p=5224"},"modified":"2016-03-25T22:44:30","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T09:44:30","slug":"cycling-in-taipei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/?p=5224","title":{"rendered":"Cycling in Taipei"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TaipeiCyclist,101<\/a><\/p>\n

I was very lucky to be sent to V\u00e9loCity Global conference in February 2016 by my colleagues at Cycling Action Network<\/a> in New Zealand, and Cyclist.ie<\/a> in Ireland.<\/p>\n

Taiwan was an interesting choice on account of its enormous bike-manufacturing history, and certainly the conference had an industry flavour.<\/p>\n

\"TaipeiUrbanView<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Taipei\u2019s an ordered, polite, fast-moving and trendy city with dense, three-to-five storey historic blocks between long & wide boulevards of multi-lane traffic.\u00a0 Scooters own the roads.\u00a0 Thousands of them swarm every traffic light and junction, and they nestle into every cranny of parking throughout the city.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Scooters\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The city layout seemed to be of wide, fast boulevards cutting through beautifully dense, lively four- to-five storey city fabric, with a scattering of high-rise commercial buildings -both residential and office- throughout.<\/p>\n

On the super-efficient and ubiquitous subway system, it\u2019s all orderliness and consideration.\u00a0 Boarding passengers wait behind white lines til the last alighting passenger has gone, and LED wand-wielding officials calmly direct passengers at rush hour.<\/p>\n

\"Taipei<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cycling was a mix of on-street in those historic blocks, and footpath along the boulevards (I tried on-road there but got scared).\u00a0 I used the\u00a0 YouBike rental system,\u00a0 the highest bike turnover of any rental system in the world- somewhat surreal since they\u2019re exactly the same bikes as in my Dublin hometown!\u00a0 There\u2019s an article about cycling in Taipei<\/a> in Guardian \u2018Cities\u2019 service by Nick Mead.<\/p>\n

Far from accommodating more car use, Taipei recently demolished a highway overpass<\/a> , to create open space round a historic building (see screen grab from that YouTube video)<\/p>\n

\"TaipeiOverpassDemo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I loved the dense, busy neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Taipei<\/a><\/p>\n

A really positive experience and one I’m very grateful for.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"WillatLarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"SunsetTaipei\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was very lucky to be sent to V\u00e9loCity Global conference in February 2016 by my colleagues at Cycling Action Network in New Zealand, and Cyclist.ie in Ireland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,42,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5224"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5240,"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions\/5240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.willandrewsdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}