Traffic

The U.S. State Department website’s section on China says that travelers should understand that drivers here consider traffic lights and rules of the road to be “advisory” rather than “mandatory.” The U.S. State Department isn’t kidding. The number and mix of vehicles on the streets of Beijing is mind-boggling, and naturally there are mobs of pedestrians too, and everyone is playing chicken with everyone else at all times.

A street with 3 or 4 or 5 or 7 lanes in each direction has a bunch of lights, and there’s a lane on each side for smaller/slower vehicles (bicycles, bicycle-driven carts, motorbikes, motorbikes with enclosures on the back, etc. etc. etc.). The latter don’t obey any traffic signals. Drivers turning left often have a left arrow at the same time that walkers have a green walk sign, and the left-turning drivers habitually beep their horns all the way through crowds of walkers and bikers in intersections. In Beijing we always made sure to stay with the crowd, because in the end the drivers don’t actually plow people down (at least we didn’t see anyone do that), though they look like they would if they thought they could get away with it.

We did see the immediate aftermath of an accident on the way to Mutianyu (the section of the Great Wall we went to). There was a car pulled off to the side of the road with a guy talking frantically on a cell phone. There was a trail of small bits of debris leading to the center left of the road, where a woman was cradling a man who had obviously been hit. There were no officials on the scene yet. Traffic was going carefully around the whole sad mess.

For the first few days in Yulin there was the additional thrill of having to walk on slippery snow-covered pavement. Jamie usually just grabs my jacket sleeve and guides me through. In Cambridge I am perfectly capable of knowing when to walk through traffic, and at what pace, and when not to, even now that I have creaky old knees. Here, no way. The mutual understandings about who gives way in what situation are all different.

In some places there are walkways built over the streets, so that people can choose to go a slightly longer way around (with stairs), but more safely. We walked over one of these in Yulin that Jamie said had just been installed -- he had seen it brought to the site. A couple of the pictures in the Yulin/Downtown album (coming up in the next post) were taken from it.

Some pictures of Beijing traffic (and commerce) here.