I mentioned yesterday that Chinese people seem to have no road sense whatsoever. You may think I exaggerate. NO.
One particularly common vice here is what I think of as the Wrong Way Bicycle - bicycles will very commonly turn left on to a main road (it's a drive-on-the-right regime) and blithely pedal away against the flow of traffic. This might be understandable, even tolerable, if they were only going a few yards, but often these guys will complete their entire journey on the wrong side of the road. And they don't generally stop, or even slow down, much less look about them before pulling out into the main road against the flow of cars and other bicycles like this. And they don't seem to pay any attention at all to anything in their path: it is as if they have an invincible belief that it is everyone else's responsibility to avoid them. This is, I think, the single greatest hazard to pedestrians crossing the road. If you give all of the your attention to the murderous traffic coming from your left, you are going to get blindsided by a Wrong Way Bicycle. An ignominious way to go! Years of exposure to Beijing traffic have made me hyper-alert to such dangers now: I have "eyes in the back of my head". But even now, I still suffer the occasional close call. (Curiously enough, things don't seem to be nearly so bad on the roads in any other Chinese city I've visited. Utter disregard for the rules of the road or basic common sense does seem to be primarily a Beijing phenomenon.)
Yesterday, I encountered an alarming first - someone doing the Wrong Way Bicycle trick in a car. Yep, a car emerging from a side street without looking, and then proceeding to drive a few hundred yards down a very busy main street on the wrong side of the road. And I didn't think driving standards in Beijing could get any worse! That'll teach me.....
2 comments:
On my roadtrip to Hohhot last year, the highway was at a standstill. The traffic snaked through the mountains for miles... produce, coal, army jeeps, and black audis, stuck in time in space amongst the great Chinese countryside.
Well, my friend, a Chinese local, who was driving, figured the best way out of this endless mess was to do a U-turn and drive back to the last highway exit... and he did! We drove at crazy highway speeds at oncoming traffic that was startled first by us, then by the sudden highway standstill, until we got to an exit from where we found an alternate route to the great plains of Mongolia.
But I have an even more odd experience of backwards driving. Afterall, in Beijing or Inner Mongolia, if odd stuff happens, you think, eh, it's China.
In DC/VA, I-395, where it passes in front of the pentagon, a law school classmate (The Cop) missed his exit, so he did the same thing! Bat and I were passengers in the car and our chatting came to an abrupt halt as we realized what was happening...
The Cop was former police, so maybe he figured it was no big deal, forgot that normal people don't do that type of stuff.
I bet the driver of the car you describe in your post is PLA, current or former.
No, I doubt he was PLA. I think my delinquent driver had only recently graduated from riding a bicycle - like so many of Beijing's drivers.
I have seen some brutally aggressive, irresponsible driving in America - Chicago, I think, is the worst. And my single scariest moment in a vehicle (OK, if we except mini-bus tours in the Chinese countryside) happened on the freeway just outside Philadelphia coming back from The British Cowboy's stag party. The driver, a recent immigrant from Greece who appeared to speak hardly any English at all, was unsure of the route, so stopped dead in the middle of the road to have a long, anguished conversation over the radio with his despatcher. OK, it was about 3 o'clock in the morning, so there wasn't much traffic around, but this really didn't feel safe. He could at least have pulled over to the shoulder. I and one of the other passengers had both studied Ancient Greek at University, and should have been able to transform that into a little passable modern Greek, but no - at that time of night, after that much alcohol, no.
Oddly enough, Naples, which is often reputed to have the worst traffic in the world, in many ways also has the BEST. It almost certainly has the highest density of traffic, but the local people are so used to it that they have evolved a driving style that enables them to keep moving, often to keep moving QUITE FAST, even when there are only inches to spare between them and the cars in front, behind, to either side. Almost all the cars there seem to sport small bumps and scrapes and crumpled corners, but significant accidents seem to be extremely rare.... and the traffic KEPPS MOVING. It's astonishing to behold. These people are surprisingly GOOD drivers - although they would be considered dangerous lunatics in almost any other city in the world.
Beijing has a unique combination of an explosion in the number of cars, a rapidly expanding pool of drivers with very little experience or training (although they are supposed to have toughened up the driving exam, the practical part of it is still very small, I understand - and, as with most things in China, it's probably quite easy to just 'buy' a pass with a well-placed bribe, or employ a ringer to take the exam on your behalf), a widespread and stubborn disregard of the law amongst ordinary people (more so than in most other parts of China, it seems to me), and a negligible degree of law enforcement.
Most of Beijing's drivers today essentially grew up in an environment without motorized traffic - or without very much of it, anyway. The vast majority have been driving for less than 10 years. In fact, I think over 50% have been driving for less than 5 years. I read a while back that there are more than 3 times as many "qualified" drivers as there are cars here - thank heavens most of them aren't getting an opportunity to drive regularly, then! Can you imagine what things would be like if they all had their own cars??
Post a Comment