Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Neillin1202/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
THE TAICHUNG CITY government came under fire late last month after a bus accident led to the death of a university student and injured another student. The two university students were studying at Tunghai University.
Taichung mayor Lu Shiow-yen has criticized the driver for negligence, while the bus company, Geya Bus Transport Company Limited, was fined 1.2 million NT. Buses operated by Geya are reportedly responsible for two deaths and 69 injuries in the past five years.
The driver of the bus, surnamed Shih, claimed not to see the student because they were wearing black. Shih was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol and he had driven the same route for fifteen years. Shih hit the students while making a left turn during a green light.
While Shih’s bail on charges of involuntary manslaughter was originally set at 200,000 NT, this was later reduced to 10,000 NT because he was unable to pay 200,000 NT.
Geya Bus Transport may have to pay further in terms of compensation and it may have subsidies from the city government reduced as a result of the incident. Lu herself has also faced criticism on social media over the incident.
Taiwan continues to prove hazardous for pedestrians, then. In spite of calls by politicians to change Taiwan’s reputation as a “pedestrian hell”. Although penalties to ensure that cars yield to pedestrians have been stiffened, according to the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, pedestrian fatalities are actually up 5.8% for the first half of this year as compared to last year.
At the same time, one notes that accidents involving bus drivers are a recurring category of pedestrian accidents. Oftentimes this seems to return to the labor conditions faced by bus drivers, rather than simply issues regarding more widespread disregard of pedestrian safety among Taiwanese drivers.
Two pedestrians were injured in Sanchong in February after a bus plowed into a crosswalk, following a dizzy spell by the driver. This was one of a number of incidents involving bus drivers passing out in past years.
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Another incident also dates to February, with a Keelung bus driver hailed as a hero for pulling the bus over before he passed out. The bus driver in question later only awoke after a ten-day coma, indicating that he was still working despite the severity of his medical condition. Other incidents in a similar vein include in January of this year, when a driver’s life was saved because a passenger performed CPR on him after he passed out at the wheel on a freeway near Taichung, a similar incident in September 2022, in November 2021, when a group of army recruits steered a bus to safety in Hsinchu after the driver suffered a heart attack, and in January 2015, when a high schooler that had never driven before managed to steer a bus to safety after the driver fainted.
Indeed, many of the fatal incidents involving bus drivers in the past decade are thought to have been due to overwork. In February 2017, it was suggested that the causes of a fatal bus accident that killed 33 were linked to the driver being overworked. Likewise, exhaustion from overwork was thought to be the cause of death of a driver found dead in a restroom in Keelung in January 2018. Overwork may have also been a contributing factor toward the murder-suicide of a bus driver in Taoyuan in 2016 after the driver deliberately started a fire on his bus, killing all of the 26 passengers aboard.
At the same time, it has proven difficult for bus drivers to win improvements in their working conditions. For example, in September 2020, reports indicated bus drivers working for the Taoyuan Bus Company were made to fake their working hours by their employers. As it was required that bus drivers insert USB drives into their buses to log their working hours when they begin driving, it was found that the Taoyuan Bus Company was requiring that drivers use two sets of USBs in order to avoid their overwork being discovered. Reportedly, some drivers had been working seventeen-hour days for fifteen days at a time. It is also generally known to be an issue that while bus drivers are supposed to be granted one day off per week, they are frequently not allowed to take that day off.
Contributing to the issue were lax labor inspections by the Taoyuan Labor Inspections Bureau. Though the bureau was located only five hundred meters from Taoyuan Bus Company’s bus station, it proved easy to tip off drivers that inspectors were en route to the station, giving them ample time to hide their USB drives. To this extent, the Taoyuan Labor Inspections Bureau was accused of being lax in its inspections, knowing about the labor law violations, but being unwilling to take action regarding them.
As such, even if there are preventable accidents that continue to occur in Taiwan as a result of a more widespread culture of disregard for pedestrian safety, issues facing bus drivers often seem to result in issues regarding overwork. It is true that contributing to such issues are lax safety measures by bus companies. Still, in the rush by the Taichung city government to pin the blame on the driver in this case, the recurrent labor issues facing bus drivers may be lost.