Woman whose child was killed on crosswalk turns grief into love

Chou Li-na, whose 17-year-old son was killed on a crosswalk near Taipei's Xinyi Road, has turned her grief into a love for young people by patrolling the roads five days a week, recording traffic situations and reporting traffic offenses to the 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 with fewer tears.

“My son's life could have been saved if I had been 'snoopy' 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, Xinyi Road, Section 3,” Chou said Saturday on the eve of Mother's Day, which falls on the second Sunday of May each year.

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 their families would be so unfortunate as 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 get some sleep and bitterly regretted that she had lacked a sense of crisis and had failed to notify the Transport Bureau before it was too late.

She said there are too many intersections in Taipei that are badly designed in terms of road safety, including exclusive lanes allowing buses to travel in the opposite direction to the rest of the traffic, too-short crosswalk times, and traffic lights that are obscured by roadside trees.

She then decided to enroll 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 penalty of a mere five months in jail for the killer bus driver, who was even able to just pay a fine in lieu of his prison term.

This decision, which she considered a shocking miscarriage of justice, depressed her so much that she threw up her hands in disgust, having totally lost faith in Taiwan's justice system.

Her apathy continued until late 2008, when yet another student was hit and killed on a crosswalk on nearby Renai Road.

“The utter desolation of the student's mother re-awakened me,” she said, adding that “I told myself that we should take action to prevent similar accidents from recurring.”

Since then, she has re-appeared on the roads as an “unofficial police woman” and is helping the bereaved family to 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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