[caption id="attachment_2591" align="alignnone" width="840"]Scooters at a Taipei intersection. Credit: Quatro Valvole/Wikimieda Scooters at a Taipei intersection. Credit: Quatro Valvole/Wikimieda[/caption]

I'm in Taiwan this month to study Mandarin. During breaks, I'll be posting occasionally about the island nation's demographics, politics and (sticky) weather.

One of the first things you'll notice about the streets of Taiwan — other than the excellent food, sweet people and formidable humidity, of course — is the constant buzz of scooters. They are everywhere — and loud and perhaps a little unsafe.

That's true even in Taipei, the capitol region, which has a world-class subway system and yet about 1 million motorcycles on the roads (as opposed to roughly 800,000 cars and trucks).

It turns out there's a proportionally startling number of motorcycles, as the government classifies them, on the roads across this country: More than 13 million in nation of just 23 million.

Most homes have them, for example:

And there are nearly twice as many motorcycles on the roads than cars and trucks, according to the government:

Though the rate of motorcycles per 1,000 population is declining: