A woman whose son was killed on a crosswalk in Taipei City 11 years ago has been monitoring traffic conditions in Taiwan’s capital ever since in a one-woman attempt to improve road safety.
Chou Li-na, whose 17-year-old son was killed on a crosswalk near Xinyi Road, has turned her grief into action by patrolling the roads five days a week, recording traffic situations and reporting traffic offenses to police.
She has been working recently to organize a “Pedestrian Priority Association” to call for more mothers to help her monitor traffic safety and promote a “pedestrian first” concept in the hope that Mother’s Day can be a happier day.
“My son’s life could have been saved if I had been nosy enough to call the Taipei City Bureau of Transportation and demand that it do something about the traffic lights on the crossroads before No. 43, Section 3, Xinyi Road,” Chou said on Saturday.
Although practically every resident living near the traffic lights is aware that the time allocated for pedestrians to cross the road there is too short, no one has bothered to alert the city government to improve the situation, she said.
“Including myself, no one believed that members of their families would be unfortunate enough to be hit on the crosswalk,” she said.
“Unfortunately, my boy was hit by a bus when he was running to cross the street on a green light that was too short,” she said.
In the first year after her son’s death, Chou said, she had to rely on drugs to fall asleep and bitterly regretted that she had put off notifying the Transportation Bureau until it was too late.
She said there were too many intersections in Taipei that are poorly designed, including exclusive lanes allowing buses to travel in the opposite direction to the rest of the traffic, crossing times that are too short and traffic lights that are obscured by trees on the side of the road.
She enrolled in a course at National Taiwan University’s law school to learn more about the public’s rights, but was dealt a heavy blow when the court handed down a jail sentence of just five months for her son’s killer, who was able to pay a fine in lieu of his prison term.
This decision, which she considered a complete miscarriage of justice, depressed her to the point that she lost faith in the judicial system.
Her apathy continued until late last year, when yet another student was struck and killed on a crosswalk on nearby Renai Road.
“The utter desolation of the student’s mother re-awakened me,” she said, adding: “I told myself that we should take action to prevent similar accidents.”
Since then, she has re-appeared on the roads as an “unofficial policewoman” and is helping the student’s bereaved family fight a lawsuit, mainly seeking government compensation for the student’s death, laid squarely at the feet of substandard traffic controls.
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