Traffic

Saw yet another fight in the traffic during the weekend. The attached picture is taken on Saturday on a four lane highway in rush hour and as you can see the guys are not just screaming and pushing each other around, but are really fighting.

The way people are driving here in Shanghai is quite remarkable. There seems to be no more rules than that there are no rules and thus the drivers are acting thereafter. The main object for a driver seems to be to get as fast as possibe forward by overtaking as many cars as possible. This means a constant change of lanes, forcing themselves in between other cars, driving down the pavement or hedging their future positions by driving ion between two lanes.

This way of driving creates quite a lot of accidents, but I have to say, they seldom seems to be serious. I think that there are two reasons for this. The first one is that the average speed in the Shanghai traffic is 7 km/h and the second reason is that the cars and trucks are sort of wobbling there way forward like a stream of water trickling its way down a slope. Everybody seems to be aware of the "rule of no rule" so they very elegantly avoid a crash by just move sideways on the road and everybody else is just following along.

But at the same time it seems as if the two reasons above also creates a lot of frustration in the traffic. If you are only moving 7 km per hour and the queues seems endless it might build some frustration. If you also add that someone in the flow do not really move in accordance with the rest of the stream, things can heat up quite a bit and there is an eruption. The result is just like in the picture - a fullblown fight on a four lane high way with thousands and thousands of other very interested drivers and passengers passing by.

Hakan

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