Parking like a pro
Video of an underground scooter parking area in Kaohsiung, Taiwan…
I can’t say I’ve experienced culture shock here in Taiwan. Partly that’s because I visited twice before moving here. But it may also be because I grew up around Japanese people in New Zealand—and there are echoes of Japanese culture all around Taiwan. (The island was a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945.)
But some things have still surprised me:
- In buildings with old plumbing, putting used toilet paper in a trash bin instead of flushing it (💩😱🤢)
- The number of young people who smoke (😷)
- The amount of scooter-specific infrastructure (🛵💨)
On this last point, major roads and bridges almost always have dedicated scooter lanes. I’ve even encountered dedicated scooter tunnels. And everywhere you go, unless your motorbike’s over 250cc, you get dedicated scooter parking spaces, too.
(Or you could just leave your scooter on the sidewalk…)
I live a 10-minute ride from Dream Mall (夢時代購物中心), the largest mall in Taiwan. It has an amusement park on the roof and 2,000 scooter parks in the basement.
The first time I rode through there on the back of a friend’s motorbike, I remember being amazed at the vastness of it all.
I was passing today and decided to get some dashcam footage so I can share this very Taiwanese experience. (Taiwan has the most scooters, per capita, in the world.)
Here’s my real-time ride through the Dream Mall scooter parking area:
It was quiet when I rode through at 4pm. By dinner time, the vacant spaces will all be taken and people will start squeezing three scooters into two spaces (or two scooters into one).
Parking at Dream Mall is free, but that’s not the case everywhere.
On my way home, I stopped at IKEA to buy a new bathmat (possibly the most boring item in the store, the Fintsen was NT$69 / NZ$3.50).
Like all paid scooter parking areas, IKEA has a camera that scans your license plate on the way in. Then you pay at a Chinese-language kiosk before getting scanned again on the way out.
For a long time, paid parking made me mildly anxious because if anything went wrong, my Chinese wasn’t good enough to ask for assistance. But I reached ‘survival Chinese’ level by late-2023, so now I can—in an indirect and grammatically-awkward way—seek help if needed.
Anyway, here’s the footage of me scanning in and out of IKEA:
I’ve blurred my license plate number, which appears on the ‘Welcome’ screen after being scanned. I have no idea what the Chinese characters mean, and need to use the Translate app at the touchscreen payment kiosk—but so far, everything’s always worked out fine.
Despite getting my Taiwanese car driver’s license last December, I don’t want to drive a car in Taiwan.
I owned a very practical SUV in New Zealand, which I drove over 30,000km each year. I assumed I’d miss it in Taiwan, but I was wrong.
If I ever hypothetically-because-it-won’t-happen move back to New Zealand, I’ll miss having a scooter instead.