Uncritical Mass

Don't you hate it when you think up a great idea and you have no way of writing it down or sharing it with someone?  Like the other day, I was walking home from work and was thinking to myself....

Dammit.  I thought that would help jog my memory.  I could've sworn it was a brilliant idea, but then again I'm the type of person that thinks adding bacon to anything is a brilliant idea.  Bacon and marshmallows?  Eureka!

Anyways, the sentences above were sitting in my drafts folder for a week until I realized what it was I wanted to talk about: traffic.  A lot of people complain about the traffic here.  Sitting in a motor vehicle in Beijing traffic has the potential to simultaneously be the most exciting, dangerous, unnerving, and frustrating thing you do here.  You generally expect cabbies to disregard traffic laws, but when an entire population of drivers ignore them it makes for interesting results.  Cars will make turns onto smaller streets from 3 lanes over, cutting front of two bustling lanes of traffic.  They sit side-by-side at an intersection on a two-lane two-way street stacked 10 deep waiting to make the same right hand turn to merge into traffic on a major thoroughfare, all the while blocking any cars attempting to use that road headed the other way  They drive 140km/h on the shoulders of the highway, park their cars anywhere they want including any sidewalk they please and the aforementioned highway shoulders.  And they honk.  Oh do they honk.  If there was a word for "incessantly-to-the-max-until-your-ears-bleed" I would use it.  I'm sure they have one in Chinese.  I think you'd generally be forgiven for thinking you went deaf if you spent a week in the CBD or Sanlitun and then returned home to DC streets.  But (most) Chinese folk don't honk out of road rage, but rather as a safety precaution.  It's an unfortunately obnoxious consequence of having 12M people in cars, on foot, et à vélo who don't give a flying banana about what the other person is doing as long as they don't hit or get hit by them.

So obviously, being a pedestrian in Beijing is no cake walk either (lolz PUN!).  Like most city people around the world, 'Jingers walk everywhere, in every direction, and at varying speeds. They walk all over the sidewalk; left side, right side, or traversing laterally like a hairy crab.  They walk on any road, bike lane, or highway pass.  And best of all, they'll walk straight at you while making direct eye contact, all the while refusing to change their trajectory until I inevitably resort to a last second shoulder-turn-bailout maneuver.  I'm 0-452 this week, playing pedestrian chicken with the locals.  And despite many 'Jing pedestrian idiosyncrasies, including my 8am dose of second-hand smoke on the way to work (everyone here smokes like a chimney stack packed with Civil War musket-grade gunpowder), I think the most interesting interaction is between pedestrians and other modes of transportation. 

The coexistence of pedestrians and vehicles has been on tumultuous terms ever since the first cave man got his toe run over by a bougier caveman and his fancy wheel.  Back then "right of way" was settled by the point of a spear or the business end of a club.  Over time, people developed laws to regulate how we vehicularly (ed- yes I just wrote that) interact with each other.  Right of way was given to pedestrians and cyclists to protect them in the event they got wrecked by a car.  Over time, that right of way developed into a mentality that simply assumed someone would stop for you if you crossed paths with their horse, carriage, jalopy, or hoopdie.  And things are getting a lot safer now.  Vehicles have all sorts of safety gizmos to keep the drivers and those around them from harm.  Granted, this wasn't always the case.  People were trampled by horses, run over with wagon wheels, crushed by Model-T's, and sent to the ER to get a tetanus booster shot and remove a piece of headlamp from their skull.  Things are indeed changing for the better, but if you thought those dangerous days were long gone, you should remove yourself from your little stateside safety bubble and come to Beijing.  Here we have a different kind of coexistence with motor vehicles.  Putting my 5-months of experience with nonsensical corporate terminology to use, I like to call it "Next-Generation DangerXR 2.0"  Here are the Version 2.0 Release notes:

• NGDXR2.0 builds upon the existing successful framework of cars not hitting people, but adds a critical component of mortal danger at every turn, a feature that was noticeable lacking in previous versions
• Cars are now given unrestricted access to sidewalks, dirt paths, bike lanes, and the walkway to the front entrance to your apartment.
• Similar governance applies to motorcycles, mopeds, scooters, and all other EVs
• Motor vehicles are allowed to buzz, raze and squeeze through any opening they find, including but not limited to: pedestrians, other motorists, bendy buses, road furniture, and actual home furniture that's been placed in the road.  Any rate of speed is acceptable, but high speeds and close calls are preferable to their "safety-saturated" alternatives.
• Those traveling on foot are granted greater access to converge on the street at intersections and form a mobile median strip of sorts to block on-coming traffic and steadily inch their way across the intersection.  This safety-in-numbers strategy shall heretofore be referred to as the "Critical Mass-Frogger Methodology" and is considered a global best practice for any metropolitan pedestrian population.
• Any persons traveling on any street, path, corridor, walkway, escalator, or aisle shall occupy the full width of that passage and must take up any excess room with their baggage, canine companion, cigarette butts, and/or other persons that they may or may not know.  Should anyone attempt to walk towards or around your blockade, you are required to hold your ground under the mandatory "Red Rover Initiative."

Obviously I need to brush up on my corporate vocabulary.  (It's hard when it's all in Mandarin.)  But please note that the words "streamline" or "efficiency" were never mentioned because it's impossible to think that anyone traveling anywhere in Beijing is looking out for anything but their own self-interests.  Traffic is the epitome of stop-and-go, and crowds are more than happy to block, push, and squeeze by you to get where they're going.  In this city, personal bubbles and comfort zones are noticeably lacking.  The culture here is about accepting close calls as the norm to the point where they're no longer considered "close" any more and you fail to see your constant exposure to harm as "dangerous."  You see it and process it as "oh-I-guess-I-better-move-now" actions like a janitor mopping the floor by your feet.  Absent here is the indignation and offense that comes when  a soccer mom fails to abide by the 3-ft rule and passes you at a life-threatening 29.5-inches. Granted, there aren't too many recreational sports that require people to use the roads for anything other than transportation.  The point is that the majority of the people here just shrug off close calls and keep on truckin'.  It's just a huge collective mass of people that aren't concerned enough with the current state of pedestrian and motor safety to criticize or change anything.

A Slow Day at Guomao Bridge