When I was taught to drive in England, my teacher taught me how to drive safely by keeping space between the cars in front and behind. “If you’re in traffic and the car behind is impatient and starts driving really close behind your car, you might be tempted to speed up to get further away from them,” he said. “In fact, that’s the worst thing to do, because it brings you closer to the car in front, and if the car in front stops suddenly, you’ll have to stop suddenly too, and then impatient car behind you will crash into the back of you. The most important thing is to have plenty of space in front of you, so if the car in front does something unexpected, you’ll have plenty of time to react.”
The key word here is unexpected. In England, almost all drivers do what is expected of them. If there’s a red light, they stop. If they’re in a right-turn only lane, they turn right. If they’re driving down a road at 30 mph with lots of cars around them, they’ll keep going straight, slow down gradually, or indicate a change of direction. Of course, sometimes someone won’t do these things, and that’s the unexpected factor. But you have to have an expected way of behaving before you can have anything unexpected…
In China, you can’t really define an expected behaviour for drivers. Red light? I guess most people will stop, but not if they’re just going round a corner to the right, that doesn’t count, right? And it’s nearly green, so a few cars might start going a teeny bit early. And those cars were over the line when it went red, so they can keep going, when the twelve cars in front of them get out of the way, of course…
In this kind of environment, when there’s no “expected” then there can’t be any “unexpected” either. And that’s how it works. All drivers know that other drivers are crazy. So everyone watches everyone else every second, and reacts to whatever’s around them. And the crazy thing is, it pretty much works. It works because it removes people’s assumptions—in the UK we might have accidents because, “I assumed it was safe to overtake because the other car was indicating left,” or some such excuse based on expected behaviour. Remove the expectations and assumptions and you remove the unexpected factor.
Sure, there are still accidents sometimes, but overall, I feel safer cycling in China than in London. I know that all the drivers around me are very aware of all the vehicles around them, and ready to react. I have to cycle differently, and I have to beware of my own expectations. But if there’s one thing crossing cultures is good for, it’s for smashing aside your assumptions.