nick’s (n)-line life

Asiapundit has inspired me to do a post on traffic in China, something which is often joked about and quite entertaining, at least until things go pear shaped (as we'll see in the second part of this article). Anyway, with traffic-lights like this:

via Useless Air - yes they're red and green at the same time!

… and an interesting take on the interpretation of the Rules of the road. It's perhaps not surprising that we end up with traffic carnage like this:

via Asiapundit and Sinosplice

It's actually pretty common! Check out another intersection:

Funnily enough China has some really excellent roads, it's just that the drivers don't match! For example, my experiences in Yantai tells me that there are suburbs with 4 lane express-ways but just a couple of bike/motorbikes on and only a couple of cars a minute - I'm told this is called future-proofing :) Anyway, this looks like a good point to squeeze in some of my personal China car-crash photos into the post…

n-line photo - Car crash north of Beijing

I was in the big white/blue bus when the little minivan though overtaking into oncoming traffic would be a sensible idea… It wasn't! Although a three vehicle pileup isn't a bad start to my Chinese scorecard, with retrospect my closest call was crossing a road in Shanghai when two cars had a head-on collission less than 5 metres away from me. At the time neither myself nor my friend even battered an eyelid!

Scariest brown-trouser time definately goes to Laos, however, when I looked up from my book to see a truck coming straight at me! Fortunately with no neighbour I had time to throw myself accross the aisle to the other side of the bus before the truck plouged into the seat in front of mine! (actually I would have been ok, the truck was only going fast enough to put a big dent in the bus, but scary all the same). Come to think of it I seem to have been in a disproportionate number of crashes while in Asia… Anyway, we're going off topic… back to China… To assist the reader in understanding the confusion which motorised vehicles cause in the middle kingdom I thought a few video clips might assist::

Videos
Hangzhou Traffic (YouTube)
Shanghai - Just a few Bikes (YouTube)

The sad thing is that these entertaining traffic scenes result in incidents like this:

Via Car Accident.com

[ warning - this inext one is quite graphic ]
Pedestrian Flip (YouTube) (ouch!)

Well, the traffic is still calmer than Vietnam I guess (Sinosplice), I'll never get over the old quarter in Hanoi which really did blow my mind! Anyway, if you haven't been put off getting a driving test yet, you might want to read about an account of two westerners applying for driving licenses in Beiing. I love the quote:

When I asked the bossy woman behind the counter where I could buy a book to swot up on it, she said breezily: "Oh there is no such thing, just ask someone who has done the test."

Cynical as I am, it strikes me that the government would greatly prefer westerns not to get driving licenses and it doesn't surprise me at all that these two failed :/ Anyway, many more comments/photo on China's traffic here but we'll finish with a really good BBC video account of traffi in Chongqing..