Road Rage

I ride my bicycle EVERYWHERE in Tianjin. Granted you can take the bus anywhere for just 1.5rmb ($.25) but riding bike here is good exercise, it's often faster than the local traffic (Tianjin has bad traffic flow problems), and riding bike, I'm convinced, greatly develops a persons motor skills.

My ride to work in the morning at 8am:
1. unlock my bike and get it out of the door of my building without touching my bike or the door with anything but my hands. Dirty dust settles instantaneously here. If I clean my bike seat the night before and bump against it the next morning before re-cleaning it I'll get a nice black smudge on my clothes.

2. swerve around a few buildings, cars that are parked in the middle of my housing area's driveway, and other early-morning bikers and pedestrians.

3. Once out of the gate of my housing area: Avoid cars coming in the wrong direction, potholes, and people walking in the middle of the road.

4. After riding beside a quaint but sometimes smelly little stream full of lotus flowers I arrive at the train tracks. Here it gets interesting. Hundreds of bikes and cars pile up and push push push their way through. Cars drive in the bike lane, completely cutting off the flow of bicycles, but that doesn't stop the bikes. We all just swerve right up onto the sidewalk.

5. Next I reach the traffic light which always has traffic police "directing" traffic in the morning because of the morning rush. Nobody obeys the traffic police or the lights. The rule in China is "Do what you need to do to get there faster". As traffic comes from the left (when traffic from my direction should be stopped) the bikes just skoot in through the oncoming traffic and as soon as they create a little traffic block, the cars from my direction follow. Horns honk, there are lots of fender-benders, and I've even been in a few crashes on occasion.

This is all the excitement I experience everyday on my way to work. I guess it's a little dangerous, but riding a bike in Tianjin (or about any place in China) is exhilarating. It's like an obstacle course or a video game that you win by arriving at your destination without having been hit and having caused as much destruction and chaos along the way as possible.