Traffic

Traffic in China doesn’t follow the laws or conventions of American roadways, as you might expect.  You see, China is a collectivist society, which means drivers from opposing traffic will share your lane with you.

Driving and walking are dangerous prospects in China (not that driving is especially safe anyplace else).  Sidewalk and street blend into one here, and cars split the street with bicycles, dogs, buses, motorcycles and motorbikes, and plenty of pedestrians.  I often wonder why so many people walk in the street- without seeming to care for their safety- and set out to use the sidewalk, but after weaving through too many food carts, tables, chicken cages, broken concrete and other construction leftovers, and parked bicycles and motorbikes, I end up taking to the street myself.

Here, the drivers honk non-stop.  It’s to alert other motorists and pedestrians of their approach, but the people here are so jaded and used to it that they won’t step aside unless they have to, and only then at the last possible moment.  One of my taxi drivers almost ran down a university student, and I can’t really fault the driver because he had his headlights on, was driving under 5 miles per hour, and had honked steadily at him several times before the young man finally flinched and stepped aside.  Last week, my uncle Jiang and I set out in his car one morning to drive back to the university from the city of Bengbu, normally a 30-minute drive.  The fog that morning was intense, you would’ve tripped over your toes if you didn’t know your heels were behind them.  Almost as thick as the fog outside was the tension inside the car.  I watched wordlessly as my uncle slowly traversed the maze of the once-familiar city streets and grunted and sighed while trying to determine what streets we were on.  Then, insanely, and I don’t use those italics lightly, pedestrians would appear- on the highway, not on the city streets- would appear in front of us, walking the wrong way, when a perfectly usable pathway- flat, smooth, and clear- lie on the other side of a separating barrier.  We would honk and swerve around them, and after surviving our 80-minute odyssey we eventually arrived home.  I often mutter to myself about Chinese drivers’ lack of courtesy and safety in relation to other drivers and especially to pedestrians, but those people walking on the highway, in the fog, were out of their minds in any culture.

Back to the taxi drivers.  Of course, they show the same temerity as taxi drivers the world over.  But here, no one shows respect to the dashes or lines indicating whose lane is whose.  So, when passing, the taxi drivers will honk several times and go left or right- whichever is most convenient, not necessarily a legal or safe driving space- to overtake whatever’s in front of them.  Once, on a four-lane road, we were in the left lane (note: China, like America, drives on the left- theoretically), blocked in front by a tour bus and on the right by a semi.  So, in his impatience, my driver passed the bus in front by going left (we’re driving the wrong way now), which is fairly common for them, but there was another car in front of us, also in the midst of passing the bus by driving into opposing traffic.  Apparently, this fellow scofflaw was too slow for the taxi driver, so he went left around him- we are into the far lane of reverse-direction traffic now.  I don’t remember how long it took to pass both car and bus, or by how little we missed a head-on collision, but if I counted it in breaths, it would have been zero.

They pile them in here, too, at least on the motorbikes.  Every morning, I can count on seeing husband and wife, or daughter and child, doubled-up on a motorbike, and if it’s raining, wearing a parka made to drape over the handlebars, or if it’s cold, using mittens that are fastened to them.  I’ve seen, more times than I can count, father driving the motorbike, mother holding on in the back, and son or daughter standing in the foot rest.  I’ve seen them carrying dogs and chickens on the back, or so many cases of beer that I don’t think I could fit them in the passenger side of my car.  The funniest, most outrageous, motorbike scene I ever saw was a woman trailing one of their motorbike-trucks (motorcycle front with a truck bed attached), and with her extended right leg she was pressing against a stack of plywood, preventing the sheets from sliding during travel.  I guess the rope and bungee cord are Western conveniences.

It’s scary and sadly funny, but too often tragic.  You’ve probably read the in the news about the two-year-old, Yue Yue, who was struck and left in the street as passersby took no notice of her brain-condition.  Or the over-packed van filled with school children that was in a head-on crash.  I heard that news from my mother and told her that awful as it was, I wasn’t surprised.  It’s sadly sobering to say something like that.

And don’t expect to easily negotiate a crosswalk here.  Take a bold mob with you if you expect traffic to yield.  I’ve seen crippled men pushing themselves on a wheeled cart in the middle of a four-way intersection, cars careening past.  Almost as alarming as this sight was the fact that no one else seemed to regard it.  When my aunt noticed my surprise, she laughed at it and basically communicated to me “That’s China for you.”