Traffic

Shanghai traffic is like a massive game of chicken.

Or a high-stakes round of Risk.

Either way, it isn't for the faint of heart.

Naive, overly polite Canadian that I am, I spent my first couple of days here assuming that when the little pedestrian was green, it meant I should cross at the indicated white-striped crosswalk. I assumed, even more idiotically, that oncoming traffic would stop for pedestrians, even when said pedestrian was in the way.

I spent my first couple of days here in the path of oncoming vehicles.

Then, after my sixth or seventh near-flattening, I figured out that the point in most intersections here is not, in fact, to just obey the traffic signals. Sure, you can take a cursory glance at them and presumably the colour of the light in front of you may factor into your decision-making. But blindly obeying traffic signals here is for chumps. If you can make it across any other way, or if you think you can make it across somehow, then away you go, and damn the trucks/pedestrians/junk-laden bicycles.

When people approach an intersection here, be they on foot, bike, moped or car-bound, there seems to be a sophisticated strategizing that goes on between them and the others approaching--a kind of risk calculation that combines guesswork, luck, manouevering skill and some unknown quality I can't fathom, let alone attempt to master. But nobody stops if they don't have to. They may slow, veer, speed up or just honk really loudly as they plow through the intersection, making hairpin turns and swerving dangerously close to anyone in their path. It's incredible there aren't piles of carcasses at every intersection.

I should note, of course, that this is an oversimplification. I have not seen anywhere near every single intersection in this city, and at the really enormous ones there seems to be more of an imperative to stop at the light. But the best example of the aforementioned is at the intersection outside my dorm room, with which I'm obsessed because I'm obsessed (and just a little tetanus-phobic) with the tiny, rusty balcony off said dorm. This intersection is a perpetual collision course: hordes of bikes and mopeds will charge through the intersection as a big, unwieldy bus heading in the opposite direction makes a perilously wide turn, barely missing them; at the same time, oncoming traffic swerves through the middle of the intersection and a tiny man on a rickety bicycle towing a food stand/barrel of garbage/kitchen door makes a slow left turn, appearing motionless in the morass of honking and screeching.

Crazy shit.

I am, of course, nowhere near co-ordinated enough to negotiate a traffic ballet that intricate and intuitive.

So I do a hesitant little dance around the corner, stride confidently into the intersection when it looks like there's a smidge of an opening, and scamper to the other side when I realize I'm being blindsided by an enormous truck. Good times.