Driving and Land Use in Taiwan

Here a car speeds past a line of waiting cars and runs a red light.

One of the things that I want to do is use this Blog as a way to elaborate on the points made on my website. So without further ado, let's comment on some issues raised on my page on Driving in Taiwan. First, two perspectives, both common. This is from George Thompson's letter of a few days ago:

Driving habits offer another example. The driving situation here is not a matter of poor driving skills, but horrendous driving habits. The driving culture illustrates a near total lack of respect for the rules of the road as indicated in the number of vehicles that run red lights at high speeds.

The response from K. Avrom Medvedovsky, while generally excellent, wavered a little on this point:

How utterly common to hear a foreigner complaining about the driving habits of Taiwanese motorists. Yes, Thompson, the Taiwanese don't drive like the folks back home. Given the sheer density of traffic on this postage stamp-sized island, is it any wonder? Nevertheless, I've yet to see or hear about incidents of road rage in Taiwan in which guns are fired. As for people running red lights, clearly Thompson has never operated a car in Montreal, or Washington, or any other major North American city, where to venture off the sidewalk is to risk life and limb.

It is true that people in large North American cities occasionally run red lights, but they do not do so routinely, nor do police cars sit idly by while major traffic infractions are committed in front of them, as happens in Taiwan (see this pic of cars driving past a line of waiting cars and illegally entering the intersection ahead of everyone else as a police car watches for an example). There's no equivalency here between North American cities and Taiwanese drivers, as any Taiwanese or foreigner who has driven in both will aver. The fact that this perception is made by both sides ought to signal that it contains a strong component of reality. And I am sure that if you actually pressed Medvedovsky, he would agree. He's just pooping all over Thompson's whining newby horse manure, and more power to him!

Medvedovsky does make one on-target observation, and that is the high population and traffic densities. Let's draw this point out a little.

First of all, it is imperative to point out that high population densities are the result of deliberate choices made by government policy, both in population planning and in land use policy. In Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s birth control and abortion were both difficult to access, as the Chinese Nationalists who were occupying the island wanted plenty of warm bodies to fill out their army to retake the mainland one day. As this fantasy faded, sensible population control policies asserted themselves. But the damage had already been done.

More important than this, however, is the land use policy that has done grievious damage to the island's living standards. Let's look at a picture of Taichung at dusk:

Notice anything strange about this picture? The taller buildings are very spread out across a wide area of the city. And more importantly, buildings of medium height are everywhere. A large American city, by contrast, has low buildings on the outskirts, with the height rising steadily until it reaches the center, where the buildings are tall indeed. An American city looks like an inverted funnel, while a Taiwanese city resembles an inverted box. Why is that?

In Taiwan, the government has insanely decided that the height of buildings shall be determined not by market forces but by government fiat. Thus, each street has a regulation that controls the height of the buildings that may be erected on that street. On some streets that is just three stories, others five, others 8, and so on. In economics this represents a quota, or a limit on the amount that can be produced. In Taiwan there is a government quota on the number of stories a given parcel of land can produce. This has a profound impact on nearly every aspect of Taiwanese life.

In the US, if the value of your land increases, you can whack down your current building and erect a new, taller one, because the value of the land determines the height of the buildings, not bureaucratic fiat. In Taiwan, no matter what happens to the value of the land, if you whack down a three story building, you can only put up a three story building. Therefore it makes no sense to knock down an existing building; there's nothing to be gained. Hence the large number of run-down, crappy, small buildings in the heart of expensive urban districts.

Because there is not enough space in Taiwanese buildings, residents are forced to engage in all sorts of illegal behavior just to obtain the requisite living space. Thus almost every building on the island has an illegal structure or two on top, as well as illegally built out balconies. Residents also are compelled to annex unoccupied space around their buildings and use it for their own purposes. Thus the customary rule that everything in front of a building or storefront belongs to that structure, including the public space.

A further problem caused by this is the sprawling cities of Taiwan in which greenspace is constantly gobbled up by developers to put up yet another block of hideously ugly and excrutiatingly identical three-story concrete pestholes.

What is the fallout for driving? Well, it's pretty obvious: too much space is devoted to buildings, and there is not enough for everything else that people need or want, like homes with yards, parks, golf courses, parking lots, and so on. This includes, of course, roads.Since the infrastructure does not take into account actual human need by either bureacratic insight or through market signals, the result is anarchy: high traffic densities that force drivers to park without consideration for the needs of others, and force them to enter intersections dangerously, and so on. Because too much space is given over to buildings, there is not enough for other needs.

Note that this is not a problem caused by Taiwan's small size, as both locals and foreigners are apt to claim. There is plenty of land in Taiwan, and nothing stops people from putting up mighty skyscrapers full of apartment buildings. That would create plenty of choices for everyone: tall buildings in the center of the city, for people who liked that lifestyle, and large homes in the suburbs, for people who liked that lifestyle, and the whole spectrum of choices in between. Here in Taiwan, though, everyone in urban areas gets the same two choices -- ugly short buildings, or cramped apartments in taller towers.

Certainly the drivers education and enforcement systems are daft here. Certainly people do not know the rules. Certainly there is no ethic of civil society that compels individuals to account for the needs of others. But the Taiwanese are not essentially evil or essentially stupid. None of the aforementioned can occur without that most basic of needs, space, being able to respond to the requirements of Taiwan's nascent civil society. And I fear that until it does, civil society will not be able to fully blossom on the Beautiful Island. As long as Taiwan's land use laws encourage an artificial density of human activity, it will not benefit individuals to behave as though civic society existed.

Why does this situation exist? Who benefits?is the question that needs to be asked. A quota, as any economist can tell you, benefits producers by driving up the price. Thus, land developers, construction companies, and cement firms are the primary beneficiaries. In other words, the Taiwanese get it coming and going: their houses are too small and poorly-constructed, and they pay too much for them. The exploitative land policy in Taiwan is solely the result of KMT greed. The land developers, cement companies, and other concerned businesses were either owned outright by the former ruling party, or by its good buddies. In the 1960s the cement companies got rich selling cement to the Americans for their imperial adventure in Vietnam. When that business disappeared, the government promulgated the Ten Great Infrastructure projects, which, not by coincidence, demanded mass quantities of cement whose producers, not by coincidence, were closely connected to the KMT. When these petered out the housing market was the natural target, and so the development boom began, fueled by the island's increasing affluence. Houses in Taiwan are built of concrete, not wood, favoring local cement companies, owned, of course, by friends of the KMT. Wooden houses are perfectly legal and you can build one if you like. The catch is, however, that the fire department won't certify it for fire safety, and without that certification, you can't get fire insurance, which means that you can't build the house. This informal trade barrier exists solely to protect the cement market in Taiwan, and the KMT's friends.

So next time someone cuts you off in traffic, reflect on the height of the buildings, and curse the KMT, and not the drivers in front of you.