woman on scooter

One of the golden rules of the road revolves around the right-of-way. Dig up memories from high school driver’s ed, and you’ll recall that the manual says something like, “the right-of-way is something you give, not take.” In Japan, a term often used to instill defensive-driving skills is yuzuri-ai no seishin, which can be translated as “the spirit of compromise/yielding”.

But we all know people who think that’s crap.

So today, we’re introducing you to a video of a vehicular standoff in Taiwan that is fast racking up hits online. There are no guns or flaming crashes here; rather, the scene is a quiet, humorous one, the like of which probably plays out across the globe on a daily basis.

We don’t even know which party is technically in the right here. Something about this single-minded lady on a scooter, though, is striking a chord with net surfers worldwide.

▼ A Wild Red Scooter Lady appears!

face-off with oncoming driver, lady on scooter, flashing headlights

If you’re traveling down a narrow street and you find yourself face-to-face with an oncoming driver, the only solution is for one party to back up and let the other pass. Who winds up drawing the short straw being the bigger person depends on the circumstances, and sometimes on the potency of the stink-eye unleashed by the motorists involved.

▼ That’s some persuasive eye right there.

hypnotoad gif

The music used in this video gives me the most laughs because, as this scooter rides smoothly comes into view and stops in front of the camera, under some other circumstance the BGM could make the situation feel like a romantic encounter in a movie. Maybe a Ruff Ryders track would have added a different flavor?

At any rate, from the moment she puts her foot down to when she glides away with that lingering side-eye, you can tell that she had no intention of giving an inch.

Some netizens say that the easiest solution would have been for this woman to go off to the side, while others speculate that the driver was in the wrong and going down a one-way street. Her semi-impatient glances to the side, defiant attitude, and various hand gestures are pretty entertaining, but some are put off by the intense glare that could rival Anna Tsuchiya’s in the film Kamikaze Girls. Other viewers with more aggressive tendencies say that they’d like to give her an Ichig– I mean, Ichiko-style head-butt.

Nevertheless, whatever the scooter lady used, it was super-effective. Well, at least the obedient driver can finally get through – oh right, there’s another car.

Comments that accompany this video tend to be rude and sometimes downright racist, so let’s get back to what the internet’s really about – cute cat videos!

▼ I’d much rather have this fellow staring me down in a narrow back road.

Care to weigh in on this motorist face-off? Use the comments section!

Inset Image: NoNaMe
Videos: YouTube 1, 2
[ Read in Japanese ]