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Driving in China
By Bob Yanega
The driving here is random, unpredictable, unstructured and impulsive – in short, an exact mirror of my personality. I love it! I would love to be the driver here. It’s like the ultimate video game – you pick whatever bizarre vehicle you want and you drive wherever you want. Anything with 2 or more wheels, powered by whatever power source – pedaling, pulling, electric motor, compressed natural gas, gasoline, diesel. Also, any combination of types of vehicles – combine a motorcycle with a dump truck, a bicycle with a farm wagon, a tricycle with a wooden cab with benches. Any crazy combination of uses is acceptable. There are bikes, trikes, pedaled rickshaws, mopeds, motobikes, motorcycles, three-wheeled motorcycles, three-wheeled cars, tractors, cars of all sizes, microvans, minivans, vans, cargo vans, small medium and large busses, microtrucks, minitrucks, and vehicles that defy any category.
The use of lanes and berms and the direction that you travel in a lane is completely at your discretion. If you are on a two-way road (with one lane going in each direction) you can just drive in the wrong lane until there is a car (or large truck or bus) coming right at you. Then you have at least seven options:
1.) Pull back into your lane (unthinkable)
2.) Intimidate the other vehicle into taking evasive action (done without malice)
3.) Swerve over onto the opposite berm and go around them on the far left
4.) Swerve back through your lane onto the right berm and overtake the cars that were ahead of you in your lane
5.) Force the oncoming traffic and the traffic in your lane to part and let you go up the middle
6.) All of the above
7.) Try a totally new move not listed here
In addition to all of the stock maneuvers listed above, the two most creative ones that we personally experienced were “the wedge”, where our cabbie just drove between two vehicles that had been peacefully merging from the ramp on the second story of a traffic circle (yes, they have double-decker traffic circles) and forced them to change direction, creating a new lane for us. The second was when our private driver approached a road repair area. All other traffic, including a police car, was funneling down and merging into the far right lane and berm to go around. He decided to get creative and cross the double yellow line to the left, dodge oncoming traffic, and outflank them all – masterful! Bravo! An artist at work.
It must be noted that all of this is done without malice or yelling or fist-shaking. When you have no rules, no one gets angry because you aren’t deviating from expectations. You expect craziness from others, you participate in it yourself, and everyone goes home happy. It would never work in the states, but it is SO COOL! I basically drive like that anyway, and here it appears to be legal! We even joined a police car in crossing the double yellow line to get around some slow traffic or dead pedestrians or something.
Speaking of pedestrians, the rules for them fits my standard practice as well (although disclosing this means that my wife will never agree to come to China). There are walk lights but basically you can walk whenever and wherever you want. In fact, the dangerous thing is thinking that the walk light being green and the traffic stopped means it’s safe to cross, as I found out one morning when a fast-moving truck came up an empty lane and ran the light right in front of me, and then two cabs made illegal turns, one whizzing by in front of me, the other behind me.
Crossing major streets is a lot like the video game “Frogger”. You go, stop, step back, step forward, stop, wait, cross more lanes, stop, step forward, wait, cross more lanes, etc. There are pedestrians, cabs, bikes, cars, motorcycles, trucks and busses going every which way, but usually not making contact. Fun stuff.
The essential piece of equipment on any vehicle here is the horn. I can fully believe that people in China have called their bosses to say that they couldn’t come to work because of car trouble and when the boss asked what was wrong and they replied “the horn is broken” he said “oh man, you’d better stay home and get that fixed”! Chinese is a tonal language, where what sounds like one sound to us can actually have several meanings. It is the same with horn blasts.
We had one bus driver (on our privately chartered bus) who, by my traveling companions timing and count, blew his horn 120 times in 7 minutes (meaning that if I do some quick calculations, he blew it about 1 jillion times in the 1 hour ride each way).
This was out on a rural freeway with very little traffic. He blew it when he was going fast. He blew it when he encountered traffic. He blew it to pass another vehicle. He blew it to let another vehicle pass. He blew it to say “I wanted to go there” and he blew it to say “boy, you beat me to the open lane”. He blew it to say “go ahead” and to say “no way”. It was a warning (to all, near and far), a celebration, a greeting. He blew it going through small towns and when there was nothing around (boredom, perhaps?). We finally resorted to blowing a train whistle that one of the guys had bought every time the driver blew the horn. He kept looking at his mirrors at first, trying to figure out where the noise came from, then seemed to finally get the hint.
The nearest I can figure is that the horn is their system of liability insurance. You honk it, proceed to do whatever you want, and if something catastrophic occurs, you can say “hey – I blew the horn!” Witnesses are guaranteed to confirm that they heard a horn, because there is no time or place in China when a horn cannot be heard blowing.
© 2009 Robert J. Yanega
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