With nearly three million cars, trucks, vans and buses cluttering Beijing’s ever frustrating road system, it’s hardly big news that traffic is a problem. Driving anywhere around Chaoyang’s bustling business district during regular working hours (and afterwards) is enough to turn even the sanest person homicidal, and regularly getting stuck on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th ring road during rush hour can make even the most ardent China lover want to book the next ticket home.
The recent four day traffic experiment, which was as much to do with pollution controls as it did traffic solutions, saw nearly half of the vehicles in Beijing taken off the roads, has been applauded as a major success in most of the local news reports, but that’s only to be expected in the wildly falsified, nationalistic climate of Chinese journalism. Danwei, one of my favorite websites for news in China, has an interesting article on what Chinese bloggers are really saying about the experiment.
What confuses me most about the countless articles written about Beijing’s traffic problems is that none of them seem to address the underlying issue of Beijing’s drivers. While it’s true that there are just too many damn cars, the other fact remains that, to put it simply, most of the people on the road simply shouldn’t have licenses.
After over a year of living in Beijing and after 11 months of frantic home to work daily commutes (of which take up at least two hours of my day), the most obvious flaw seems clear. The majority of people on the roads don’t follow the rules, and aggression and road rage are standards to be maintained. There is no courtesy or common sense, and the car horn is liberally used. During my drive to work this morning down the 4th ring road, I counted over 120 cars who weaved in and out of traffic without bothering to turn on their signal lights. While I won’t ask the obvious question of why Beijing drivers feel the need to change lanes every few seconds, I found that over half of the aforementioned drivers didn’t seem to think it was necessary to even check if there was room to change lanes, instead choosing to hurtle themselves over the white dotted line and hoping for the best. The minor chaos that this simple, inconsiderate act alone created lengthened the trip time and left me cursing and holding my breath, all the way thanking the powers that be that I hadn’t died along the way.
Why is there so much disregard for simple traffic laws? Why can’t rules be enforced? I understand that there are alot of cars on the road, but how does the city expect anything to change when the very basics of driving safely are ignored? At the risk of sounding imperialistic, solving the traffic problems in Beijing have as much to do with the culture as it does with the logistics – teaching people to follow the rules, to watch out for their fellow drivers, to think rationally and to cherish safety will do as much for the roads as the elimination of cars.
Next week at SundayLovers… “Why the fuck is “Stand right, walk left” such a difficult concept” and “How to enter and exit an elevator/subway train without pissing off the whole world.” Until then, ciao for now!
