Traffic lights

Like all cities, Tainan has a mixture of traffic signals. Some are the older ones like the one on the left. It has the typical green and red but the yellow seems unused as not of much use.

There's a story about mainland China, during Mao Tze Dong time, the RED communist party party tried to throw off the vestiges of western imperialism by changing the traffic signal intention so that red = go and green = stop. The experiment
lasted a few days before the number of accidents forced a revision to the the
imperialist way. Political purity meets historical practicality.

Some of the best traffic lights in Tainan are the ones with a pedestrian count down. It tells you the number of seconds on the current state red or green. This is much different than in the US car-friendly way where the weight of the car at the intersection signals a need for changing the signal. Bellevue has this system augmented with push buttons for pedestrians. Bicycles are just out of luck and so encouraged to break the law and run the light.

The count down system is old, Ely and I saw it for the first time in our trip to China in 1999. But it hasn't caught on in the US because the US doesn't like pedestrians. The stop signal in the Tainan count down system is just the fixed character as shown above. But the go signal character is animated and this walking character speeds up as the clock counts down. It's amazing what can be done with LEDs. It was hard to get a still shot of the walking man, I tried several shutter exposures without much luck. So I took a movie and then extracted a still from the movie. This is the figure at the left. Of course all motorcyclist see the count down and you can heard them revving their engines at the pedestrian count down proceeds. The count down system of course is not "demand driven" as the times in each direction are set by the traffic management but it is certainly a more 'transparent" system.

Below is a movie of the last 10 seconds of a green light. Blogger is usually pretty good at reorienting photos but with movie it's sideways. (Just double click the triangle below the movies.




I finally had some noodles here in Tainan. This Nu Ro Mian, that is beef noodles. I'm not sure which part of the cow was in the noodles but it was one of the toughest parts. Maybe because the meat was so tough it had to be cooked for a long time and that made the broth very delicious. The vegetable was Cong Qing Tsai another tropical plant.