A newcomer guide to Taipei transport

Five minutes, filmed on the system itself, for anyone who arrived in Taipei recently and has been quietly guessing ever since.

It starts with the card, because everything else follows from it: where to buy one, how to top it up, and why tapping on a bus works differently from tapping at a barrier — a distinction that catches out nearly everybody in their first fortnight.

Then the MRT, explained by colour rather than by name, because that is how the signage works and how people actually navigate. A transfer at a big interchange is shown in real time, walk included, which is the part a map leaves out. Buses get their own section, since they are the genuinely confusing bit: front door or back, when to tap, and how to read a stop that lists a dozen routes.

It finishes with the unwritten rules — the queue markings, the priority seats, the escalator convention — all of which are obvious once you have seen them and mysterious until you have.