In talking about the differences between Shanghai and other places I know, I have to mention the traffic. The Shanghaiese really take bad driving to whole new level.

In Vancouver the drivers are what I would describe as "sleepy".
- They stop for red lights,
- They wait patiently behind someone turning left, or pull out to pass the left turner only when right lane is free of traffic.
- They drive around 100 to 110 km/h on the freeway.
- When traffic is very thick, they will wait until they can completely cross an intersection before crossing it, so that they don't block traffic if the light turns green for the other cars.
- If two lanes merge into one, Vancouver drivers will obediently use the "zipper" technique, with every other car getting their turn to merge.
- When a pedestrian tries to cross a road, both lanes of traffic will stop to let the person cross. This last behaviour is frequently recounted in awe by visitors to the city "You can sometimes just stand on the side of the road, looking like you intend to cross, and cars will stop". Which is sometimes true.


Basically, Vancouver drivers are the epitome of traffic rule followers. Why are Vancouver drivers like this? Mainly because of the stereotypical "laid-back" attitude they have. They couldn't be bothered to be "jerks". It's too much work.

There are obviously other kinds of drivers in Vancouver - usually, but not always, leanings towards the "jerk" variety - but they are the minority.

Montreal drivers, however, are reknown for being agressive. The speeds are faster (120km/h on highways is the norm), the red lights are less respected, there is no patient waiting, there is no "zipper" technique, and pedestrians are more often than not ignored, if not run down.

One typical Montreal scene is a quebecoise girl in a small car, flying up to an intersection, (missing 3 pedestrians by mere inches and now blocking all the pedestrians from crossing the street), looking for an opening, then flooring it to get into traffic. The whole time she's chatting with her friend in the passenger seat. If you look at their eyes, you can see that neither was in the least aware of the pedestrians. To a female montreal driver, when she is in her car, all she needs to worry about are other cars. I'm not only singling out women montreal drivers - men are often the fastest, most dangerous drivers in Montreal, taking great pride in weaving their cars at high speeds like race cars through dense traffic (Patrick? :-)), but they tend to be more aware of their surroundings. what's worse? I don't know. But what I do know is that Montreal is a much more dangerous city in terms of traffic than Vancouver (unless it snows, but that's a whole different story).

To me, Vancouver represents the "North American" style of driving, and Montreal represents the "European" style of driving. This is quite a generalisation, not least of all because Montreal is actually in North America, but I'm just writing a blog, not a Master's thesis. Get over it.

Back to Shanghai.
Shanghai driving is so much more extreme that Montreal looks like sleepy Vancouver in comparison. The driving is a reflection of the "me first, or else I'll never get it" attitude people have here. I'll talk about that some other time... But for now:

- Red lights? Merely a recommendation. If you honk your horn, you can go through a red light anyway. Other people will hear your horn and (hopefully) avoid you.

- Waiting patiently? Never! As soon as someone is blocking the way in front of you, it's the car driver's duty to get around the blocker, no matter how much traffic is on the next lane. Sometimes cars will pass people trying to turn left by passing on the _left_ _side_, going into oncoming traffic, and actually blocking the left turner. Just try to imagine that...

- Right of way? Hah! _I_ am right, out of _my_ way! This is the attitude of everyone on the road. Fortunately, a pedestrian can take this attitude as well. All you have to do is brazenly cross a road, looking only at your destination (a tactic tought to me by Eve). If the oncoming car sees that you don't see him, he'll drive around you. If you make the mistake of looking at him, he'll know you've seen him and expect you to get out of his way. It takes a lot of guts to cross a street without looking left or right. I've only done it twice, and both times I was very nervous... But I didn't get killed, which is a good thing.

- Even when traffic is not thick, cars will block intersections to ensure they get to the other side no matter what. In fact, this is so bad that once the light turns red, many cars continue to try to make it across the intersection. If there are already cars blocking the intersection, some drivers will even think "well, since there are already cars there, I might as well go there as well".

- Any kind of respect for pedestrians is non-existant. If a car is trying to turn in an intersection, and a large group of pedestrians are crossing the street, the car will still try to push his way through the people. Fortunately, the cars do slow down occasionally for this maneuver, but I have often been in a taxi that has driven full speed through a gap in pedestrians crossing a cross walk. Though no one was hit, the taxi did go by a few people by mere centimeters. This kind of thing is so common that even the pedestrians don't think twice about it. Unless they're tourists, at which point they become dutifully shocked.

- In other cities, busses respect the denizens of the street. They stop more for pedestrians, they are more patient when waiting for someone to get out of their way... In Shanghai, the opposite is true. A Shanghai bus driver must think "I'm bigger, therefore more important". Buses honk more, run down pedestrians more, cross/block busy traffic more, ignore red lights more... In other words, the bus drivers are by far the most agressive around here.

There are 3 things I find interesting about all this:
1. It works. Somehow, with all the cars blocking intersections, the traffic continues to flow. The Chinese have brought "nudging your way through crowds" down to a science - whether it's a bus making it's way through a crowd of 1000 pedestrians, or a biker making his way through in intersection with a traffic gridlock.

2. No one cares, except for the foreigners. When my taxi driver flew through the small gap of pedestrians crossing the street, only I got scared and reacted. The people who nearly got hit seemed almost oblivious to how close they came to being killed. They didn't completely ignore the taxi, they noticed it, but they didn't seem all that bothered. The opposite is true for tourists. They are incredibly paranoid about the traffic - rightly so, it's insane by our standards.

3. No one gets killed. In my western mind, I've been programmed to believe that if everybody drove faster, or didn't follow the rules, the consequence would be mayhem on the streets - bodies piling up daily as cars ran over people, crashed into each other and ran down fruit stands like in a cheap action movie. Instead, in the month I've been here, I have seen only 1 accident, and a little fender bender at that. Strangely, virtually all the cars here are new(ish) and dent free. How is this possible? I don't know. I think it's because _everybody_ drives this way, so they aren't surprised when a taxi turns into oncoming traffic, drives 100m, then turns left into a side street. They just change their current trajectory to avoid the taxi and don't worry about it.

Well, this has become quite the long post. Hope it was entertaining...