| > In Beijing, the idea of yielding to pedestrians when turning doesn't seem to exist. It's odd. I remember when people were bemused by the bicycle city, and yet I also remember when I learned that the way to cross the street in Beijing was never to indicate that you could see a car coming, because then they'd assume you'd stop. Instead, you watch for traffic out of your peripheral vision and keep your eyes forward so that they'd feel you couldn't see them. I wonder if that's still common wisdom. > It got to the point where I measured the difficulty of any walk not in terms of distance but in terms of how many intersections I'd have to cross. One of the possibly most frustrating moments I had was recently in downtown San Jose. My cousin and I (and others) had finished lunch and left into an alleyway. Her four-year-old son cheerfully ran out to the sidewalk, and we panicked because it would have been so easy for him to keep going out to the street itself. There was no harm (he indignantly pointed out that he had not gone into the street), but it perplexes me why we find these kinds of risks acceptable. Every block, we've essentially put down a death trap for the young. I could understand it if this was the edge of the untamed wilds and we couldn't really do anything about the wolf pack in the area, but... we built these cities. > The Chinese are strangely cavalier about cars in general. Essentially nobody wears seat belts, for example, I've noticed this is prevalent elsewhere in Asia: there are often similar claims made about Mumbai or Bangkok. |
Personally, I think that not indicating you can see cars coming and crossing that way would be a good way to get killed. However, I haven't actually tried it. I haven't observed the natives using this tactic either as far as I can tell.