One of the most stereotypical images of China is a street full of bicycles. They're supposed to be ubiquitous, right? I'm pretty sure that the English language transliterated "Peking" to "Beijing" so that China's capital city would alliterate with "bicycle". That way we could say things like, "this car's got more rust than a Beijing bicycle", or "he's redder than a Chinese fireman on a Beijing bicycle" when referring to someone with excessively leftist political opinions. There are many more such sayings that I may include in future blog posts, but I trust that you get my point sufficiently for the purpose of this post: Americans have traditionally associated Chinese transportation with bicycles.
As an avid bicyclist, I was bursting with excitement to purchase a bicycle of my own as soon as I got to Kunming. I had the privilege to ride a bicycle in Urumqi back in 2011 while I was there. Riding bicycles in China is cathartic. With all 1.3 billion people perpetually trying to go the same way you are, you have to be very aggressive to get anything done. You have to cut people off in order to cross the street and you have to look for every little opening to maintain forward progress. I don't consider myself a very aggressive person, but get me on a bicycle in China and I'm a downright ass-hole. I swerve around pedestrians loitering in the street, I butt out in front of on-coming traffic ignoring their red-lights and I hop from sidewalk to street and back looking for the clearest route. It's a game of inches and in a place like China, the margins are hotly contested. For someone as calm as me, a ten-minute bicycle commute to school every morning can be pretty cathartic.
But as a bicyclist, I am sadly a minority in China. The streets are still full of two-wheeled vehicles, but they are electric powered instead of pedal powered. These street demons are referred to in English as "e-scooters" or "e-bikes". I have no idea what they're called in Chinese. Despite their environmental friendliness, I despise these vehicles and, as of today, am at war with them.
When I think of scooters in Asia, I associate them with an ear-piecing whine, or obnoxiously loud "put-put" as their dinky two-stroke engines strain to move entire families, their chickens and their sofas up the road. Ever looking for a way to improve their pollution problem, China (or at least Kunming) appears to have switched over to electric propelled scooters. I haven't seen a single hydrocarbon powered scooter or motorcycle in Kunming. We've seen one or two outside of town, but they are mysteriously absent from the streets. It makes me wonder if gas powered bikes have been outlawed all-together. There are outlets in most scooter parking areas where people can charge up their bikes and you can buy one used for around $500. If you're sane, you carry no more than one other person on the back of your scooter. But if you're the majority of Chinese e-scooter drivers, you are perpetually moving your living room furniture around town on the backseat. Bungee cords are amazing.
They certainly carry the hero's curse in that their greatest virtue is also their downfall. True, gone are the days of noisy, smelly, puny motorbikes and scooters. But in their place are lethally silent predators who sneak up on you and attack with as much noise as the drop of a feather. AND, since they don't move as fast as car traffic and they have two wheels, they use the bicycle lane! They are the big fish in the small pond, which makes them even more petulant predators.
You may be thinking, "Wait, Ben, bicycles are pretty quiet, too, how are the e-scooters any different than them?" To that I answer, about 200 pounds of mass. Plus, the bicycles here (as alluded to in the first paragraph) are rusty and squeaky and, therefore, actually easier to hear than the e-scooters. I remember when, as a youngster, our family cat (Lucy) kept catching live birds and bringing them into the house. We put a bell on her for a while to give the birds in the yard an edge over her. I feel like the e-scooters should all be fitted with a bell so that we could hear them coming. It's a lot more pleasant than a lawn-mower engine, right?
Just today, I was crossing the street and almost got hit by one. Already familiar with the fact that they often go the wrong way on one-way streets (I admit, I do it too sometimes on my bicycle) I checked to my left just to make sure none were coming. The coast being clear there, I looked to my right to check for traffic there. I had looked to my right for maybe... two seconds, but as I started crossing, an e-scooter stealthily zoomed past me going the wrong way and clipped my knee. That was the last straw. I was wary of these devil machines before, but that incident put me over the edge and I am now firmly against these things. If there are any physicists or electrical engineers out there reading this, about how strong of a magnet would I need to disable these e-scooters? I'm thinking about packing a super-electro-magnet in my backpack and zapping these things as I ride down the street. I'll let you guys know how that works out.
I shouldn't be so hard on China. The universal use of electric scooters here really is a huge improvement over the motorbikes of the past. They're stealthiness is great for urban noise pollution and the use of electricity instead of gasoline certainly contributes to clearing up the smog. They're so great, in fact, that everyone appears to have turned in their bicycles for e-scooters. Often, when I'm debating the morality of cutting people off as I'm bicycling down the street, I console myself by saying that I'm just fitting into the traffic culture here. Maybe I need to get with the program and join e-scooter culture myself?
*****
For those who haven't been updated, my girlfriend and I moved to Kunming, China Feb. 26 and we'll be here for about the next six months. I've been trying to write an introductory blog post but we've been having connectivity issues. It looks like we've resolved those though, so keep an eye out for more!
As an avid bicyclist, I was bursting with excitement to purchase a bicycle of my own as soon as I got to Kunming. I had the privilege to ride a bicycle in Urumqi back in 2011 while I was there. Riding bicycles in China is cathartic. With all 1.3 billion people perpetually trying to go the same way you are, you have to be very aggressive to get anything done. You have to cut people off in order to cross the street and you have to look for every little opening to maintain forward progress. I don't consider myself a very aggressive person, but get me on a bicycle in China and I'm a downright ass-hole. I swerve around pedestrians loitering in the street, I butt out in front of on-coming traffic ignoring their red-lights and I hop from sidewalk to street and back looking for the clearest route. It's a game of inches and in a place like China, the margins are hotly contested. For someone as calm as me, a ten-minute bicycle commute to school every morning can be pretty cathartic.
But as a bicyclist, I am sadly a minority in China. The streets are still full of two-wheeled vehicles, but they are electric powered instead of pedal powered. These street demons are referred to in English as "e-scooters" or "e-bikes". I have no idea what they're called in Chinese. Despite their environmental friendliness, I despise these vehicles and, as of today, am at war with them.
When I think of scooters in Asia, I associate them with an ear-piecing whine, or obnoxiously loud "put-put" as their dinky two-stroke engines strain to move entire families, their chickens and their sofas up the road. Ever looking for a way to improve their pollution problem, China (or at least Kunming) appears to have switched over to electric propelled scooters. I haven't seen a single hydrocarbon powered scooter or motorcycle in Kunming. We've seen one or two outside of town, but they are mysteriously absent from the streets. It makes me wonder if gas powered bikes have been outlawed all-together. There are outlets in most scooter parking areas where people can charge up their bikes and you can buy one used for around $500. If you're sane, you carry no more than one other person on the back of your scooter. But if you're the majority of Chinese e-scooter drivers, you are perpetually moving your living room furniture around town on the backseat. Bungee cords are amazing.
They certainly carry the hero's curse in that their greatest virtue is also their downfall. True, gone are the days of noisy, smelly, puny motorbikes and scooters. But in their place are lethally silent predators who sneak up on you and attack with as much noise as the drop of a feather. AND, since they don't move as fast as car traffic and they have two wheels, they use the bicycle lane! They are the big fish in the small pond, which makes them even more petulant predators.
You may be thinking, "Wait, Ben, bicycles are pretty quiet, too, how are the e-scooters any different than them?" To that I answer, about 200 pounds of mass. Plus, the bicycles here (as alluded to in the first paragraph) are rusty and squeaky and, therefore, actually easier to hear than the e-scooters. I remember when, as a youngster, our family cat (Lucy) kept catching live birds and bringing them into the house. We put a bell on her for a while to give the birds in the yard an edge over her. I feel like the e-scooters should all be fitted with a bell so that we could hear them coming. It's a lot more pleasant than a lawn-mower engine, right?
Just today, I was crossing the street and almost got hit by one. Already familiar with the fact that they often go the wrong way on one-way streets (I admit, I do it too sometimes on my bicycle) I checked to my left just to make sure none were coming. The coast being clear there, I looked to my right to check for traffic there. I had looked to my right for maybe... two seconds, but as I started crossing, an e-scooter stealthily zoomed past me going the wrong way and clipped my knee. That was the last straw. I was wary of these devil machines before, but that incident put me over the edge and I am now firmly against these things. If there are any physicists or electrical engineers out there reading this, about how strong of a magnet would I need to disable these e-scooters? I'm thinking about packing a super-electro-magnet in my backpack and zapping these things as I ride down the street. I'll let you guys know how that works out.
I shouldn't be so hard on China. The universal use of electric scooters here really is a huge improvement over the motorbikes of the past. They're stealthiness is great for urban noise pollution and the use of electricity instead of gasoline certainly contributes to clearing up the smog. They're so great, in fact, that everyone appears to have turned in their bicycles for e-scooters. Often, when I'm debating the morality of cutting people off as I'm bicycling down the street, I console myself by saying that I'm just fitting into the traffic culture here. Maybe I need to get with the program and join e-scooter culture myself?
*****
For those who haven't been updated, my girlfriend and I moved to Kunming, China Feb. 26 and we'll be here for about the next six months. I've been trying to write an introductory blog post but we've been having connectivity issues. It looks like we've resolved those though, so keep an eye out for more!
Though I understand your constraint on the predictability of e-scooties due to the lack of noise, I must say in India though everybody honks constantly I became deaf to the noise surrounding me. Making out which honk means what is most of the times impossible as everything becomes a cacophony of deafening horn whistles. Sometimes they are an awakening alarm but they are so incredible loud that I have to control my heart beat and survival instinct and not accidentally pull my scooter too far to the right or left hitting a passing vehicle which clearly will not keep a safety distance. The only helpful noise is a when the Titanic soundtrack starts blurring across the streets indicating somewhere somebody is reverting his/her car. (There are other song options on can choose here for the reverse gear but "My heart will go on" is definitely the most popular currently.)
ReplyDeleteRather than a noise question it is more a question of predicting driving behavior of each vehicle group (car, scooter, bicycle, rickshaw, cow, pedestrians on makeshifts). In India I never drive on the left lane like every two wheeler because everybody just shoots out of a minor road without looking right or left. That is actually how most accidents happen. So, I started driving closest to the center lane (note the concept of lanes nobody understands in India) which usually is reserved for cars but it is a much safer place to be. Cars will watch out more for two wheelers than two wheelers for two wheelers. The reason being who ever has more wheels is guilty for any accident that happens.
I do agree though riding on (most) Asian roads is a war and one needs to have an ego and it is a constant strategy game. I enjoy that. I am wondering if the recently started "don't drive zig-zag" traffic campaign will change anything going forward in India.