My new school is only about two city blocks away from my new apartment, which is great! But the first block is complicated by a HUGE intersection. Freedom Boulevard intersects with The People's Avenue, and it's an eight-lane cross. I live on the tenth floor above this intersection, and so hear the honks from the intersection floating up all day as I sit here.
The first day I was walking home by myself, still very jet-lagged and a bit exhausted from learning all these new things, I needed to cross the street. As I've noted earlier, to cross a street in China means you look at the traffic, never the traffic light. So I'm watching the traffic and the pedestrians, taking my cues from then as to when was safe to cross.
But as I watched the traffic I noticed a strange thing: one lane in the middle wasn't moving. The first car was a taxi, with someone in the passenger seat on a cell phone. I thought perhaps they were stuck, stalled, etc. People were dodging out from that lane into the other lanes to get around, and there was a bus sitting behind them. My jet-lag fogged brain couldn't come up with a truly plausible scenario for the traffic not moving, especially as the bus wasn't honking, but was just sitting.
Then some lights changed, and some of the pedestrians walked (but some didn't). It was the left arrow turn time. However, I noticed that the lane that had been stalled before was also going left. Turns out they've organized that intersection so that the far left lane turns left with the arrow, but so does one of the middle lanes. Means for less sneaking and congestion in the middle of the intersection (and perhaps a buffer for later on in the year when the ice comes?)
Of all the things this last week, this left turn lane in the middle of the straight lanes of an intersection was the one that surprised me most!!
The first day I was walking home by myself, still very jet-lagged and a bit exhausted from learning all these new things, I needed to cross the street. As I've noted earlier, to cross a street in China means you look at the traffic, never the traffic light. So I'm watching the traffic and the pedestrians, taking my cues from then as to when was safe to cross.
But as I watched the traffic I noticed a strange thing: one lane in the middle wasn't moving. The first car was a taxi, with someone in the passenger seat on a cell phone. I thought perhaps they were stuck, stalled, etc. People were dodging out from that lane into the other lanes to get around, and there was a bus sitting behind them. My jet-lag fogged brain couldn't come up with a truly plausible scenario for the traffic not moving, especially as the bus wasn't honking, but was just sitting.
Then some lights changed, and some of the pedestrians walked (but some didn't). It was the left arrow turn time. However, I noticed that the lane that had been stalled before was also going left. Turns out they've organized that intersection so that the far left lane turns left with the arrow, but so does one of the middle lanes. Means for less sneaking and congestion in the middle of the intersection (and perhaps a buffer for later on in the year when the ice comes?)
Of all the things this last week, this left turn lane in the middle of the straight lanes of an intersection was the one that surprised me most!!
