Beep-beep, beep-beep, yeah

Walked home in the rain today and foolishly stopped in at the supermarket to get some bits and pieces. Note to self: carrying a laptop, shopping bags, some loose items that wouldn't fit in the shopping bags, and an umbrella is not condusive to a pleasant stroll.

Anyway, on the way back to the apartment I went past one of the biggest traffic jams I've ever seen - there must have been 50 buses in the space of a few hundred metres...and none of them was moving. At all. And this included the main part of the intersection itself - the whole place was absolutely chock-a-block (is that a really Aussie saying or does it just sound like it?) full of vehicles.

Attempting to get across a pedestrian crossing in such a situation is a bit of a challenge - it seems like the drivers take it personally if anything on the road is moving and they are not...and this includes people. There were a couple of instances where I tried to walk behind one bus only for the driver of the one behind it to close the (already miniscule) gap between them so that not even Lindsay Lohan would have gotten through.

This leads me to recall some of my other traffic observations from my time in Shanghai so far:

• Red lights are not a directive telling you to stop, they are simply an advisory that if you continue, you may run into cars traveling the other way.

• The horn is not an optional component, it is an essential part of the driving experience. There is a reason that the horn is accessed via a trigger-like interface on most cars here - if you have not beeped your horn in the last 20 seconds, you are doing something wrong. In fact, I believe people here have had their licences confiscated for 'insufficient horn usage'.

• On a dual-lane road, there are actually three lanes available to you - the two traveling in your direction, and one of the ones going in the other direction. Especially if the people in front of you are only doing a paltry 10km per hour over the posted speed limit.

• Pedestrians do not have the right of way, even at pedestrian crossings. If you are audacious enough to want to cross the road, you can damn well wait until the cars have gotten where they want to go first.

I'm sure there are others that I can't think of at the moment - I'll post them as they come to mind.