Friday, November 3, 2017

The Great Wall of China
7. The Scooter

I was not driving too fast during the accident. In fact, we were stationary. Before we even left Beijing, we came up to one of those large Chinese intersections with 16 lanes moving in 6 different directions. We had a green light, but I have enough experience with Chinese driving to know how irrelevant light color is. I slowed down, as I always do at intersections, and hit a scooter that was racing out from one of the cross streets.

As soon as I saw the scooter, I slammed on the brakes. I pressed the brake and clutch so hard into the floor, I'm surprised nothing broke. Scooters running red lights are nothing special in China. It's like a fight at a hockey game. It happens all the time. You know it's going to happen. Don't go if you are not ready for it. That is why I slow down at intersections.

Had I been Chinese, I would have killed the scooter driver instantly. Since I was going slower than usual, I had enough time to slow down just enough to knock him off his scooter. He was upset, but uninjured. It's kind of funny how Chinese scooter drivers break as many laws as possible while driving and then get mad at anyone who follows the rules. While he was yelling at me for hitting him because he ran a red light, I unbuckled my seat belt to get out of the car.

When you have a collision in China, you are supposed to keep your car where it is. That might block traffic, but the police, if they ever get involved, want to see everything in whatever position it landed. If everyone moved to the side of the road to let traffic pass, the police would never know how much people are lying to them. Even with cameras in almost every car, lying is still the default reaction. If two cars are on the side of the road and he says she did it and she says he did it, the police would never know who to blame. If the cars are in their original positions, it is easier to make an assumption about what happened. Safety is never the primary concern. Assigning blame is what matters most. Chinese traffic laws are not designed to avoid collisions. They are about how much you pay the other person if it is your fault.

Had the police arrived at this point, the scooter driver would have insisted that he was driving slowly and legally and that I barrelled out of nowhere and broadsided him. He most likely would have said disparaging things about female drivers in Chinese, assuming that I would not understand or be able to speak to the police officer myself. Then I would have told the police what really happened and tried not to smile smugly while showing him the camera. Victory would be mine. The scooter driver would have paid a small fine and that would have been the end of it.

Unfortunately, the police did not arrive at this point. There are surveillance cameras everywhere in China, but not much of a police presence on the roads. That is one reason traffic laws are mostly ignored. No one will ever pull you over to issue a ticket.


The Great Wall of China part 1

4 comments:

  1. scooter should be banned for life

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  2. Banning scooters in China would be like banning self-righteousness in the United States.

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  3. But if cars have cameras why don't the police want people to pull over? Get out of the way and show the police what happened on tape.

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  4. Every car has cameras these days, but leaving your car where it lands is the way the police have been doing it for decades. That's what everyone's used to doing. They're not exactly quick to change.

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No hate, please. There's enough of that in the world already.