What you need to know
The outskirts of Taipei get increasingly sketchy and the Zhongli district of Taoyuan still stands out as the car theft capital of the greater Taipei region.
Taipei is a famously safe city by world standards, but residents still have to deal with the problems of urban life, vehicle theft among them.
Data from the National Police Agency shows that while Taipei City is a great place to leave a car or scooter (Why even take the keys out?), the outskirts of the greater Taipei region get sketchy.
About two-thirds of the police reports from the past year specified the township in which they occurred. Because this data is incomplete, we can’t use it as an absolute measure. However, the Zhongli district of Taoyuan still stands out as the car theft capital of the greater Taipei region.
Even Zhongli isn’t that bad by international standards; its vehicle theft rates per capita are still less than one-third that of Seattle. This is not just a product of more people in the U.S. having cars to steal – Seattle and scooter-loving Taoyuan have similar levels of vehicle ownership.
According to this data, Taiwan as a whole averaged 68.6 vehicle thefts per 100,000 people in the past year, just higher than Switzerland and lower than Spain, according to the UNODC.
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Editor: Edward White