I spend a lot of time in Taxi’s. This is not my favorite pastime, every trip involves a near miss, much usage of the phantom brake, a few moments of closed eyes and silent prayer that I make it back home / to work alive. As a result of these frequent trips, I have compiled the following observations.
- No matter how large or how small your vehicle, drive as if it handles like a 4 cylinder 1.5 litre car and that you are Ayrton Senna / Michael Schumacher
- Your level of confidence on the road is inversely proportional to the size of your vehicle
- If one or more cars, trucks, buses, rickshaws, bicycles or pedestrians are attempting to fit into a space, it’s probably a good idea for you to try and fit your car or truck in there as well
- Tailgating, maintaining a safe distance of 30 cm or less, using your horn and flashing your lights is a courteous way of saying “you are driving to slow, please move out of my way”
- Lane markings are more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule, feel free to change position without warning
- When crossing the road as a pedestrian, look everywhere. Left right, behind, in front, possibly even up and down. Cars are everywhere, as are people on silent and nearly invisible electric bikes
- As a pedestrian, you may cross the road at any time. A red light simply means you have a better than 90% chance of being run over. A green light means you will be nearly hit by someone on an electric scooter
- If it is really foggy and visibility is very limited, even to one car length, see point 1.
- After nearly running someone down in your car, stop, wind down the window and hurl torrents of abuse at said person, even if they are shaking and in tears from having the crap frightened out of them. According to my Chinese colleagues, these actions translate into “the driver is saying sorry”
- I’ve saved the best for last. Driving, smoking, talking on the mobile phone and reading the newspaper. No, this is not the list of collective tasks occurring in our taxi, but the list of things that one man, our driver, was doing, all at once. This was in Beijing, and a few years back, but it had to go up here. We asked the guy to stop reading the paper, which he did.
Thats pretty much everything I have seen on my commute over the last few months. What more can there be……check this Black Heart…Blue Cab
u forgot the one where the cab was head-to-head with an on-coming yellow truck, just to get, like, 1 car-length ahead !
I haven’t forgotten, It’s forever burnt into my consciousness. Occasionally I have Vietnam war style flashbacks to it when I am driving to work.
As a colleague from Brisbane commented on a visit to Shanghai “…the only reason they have zebra crossings here is so that the police /ambos only need to scrape up the bodies from one place…”