A light snow fell over Beijing earlier this evening, maybe two or-so inches. In the cab coming home from a rock concert near Nanluoguxiang I realized how a majority of drivers had not brushed off their cars' back windows before hitting the roads.
I asked the driver of my cab, "On snowy days like this, do you see a lot of people who don't brush off their back windows?"
"Why would they brush them off?" was his response.
"To see out," I answered. Obviously, I thought.
"Why would they want to see what's behind them?"
"The cars, and other things behind them, if they want to change lanes… you mean, you don't look out your back window?"
"No… I only worry about what's on the left and right and in front of me." He then proceeded to turn his rear view mirror so it was facing up to the ceiling of the car, as if it were obstructing his view out of the windshield. "Sometimes I'll even turn this mirror like this!"
He said he'll use his side mirrors to know if there are cars to the left or right of him if he is going to change lanes, but I pointed out how the windows were all fogged up and you couldn't really see what might be on either side; he said, well you can see their headlights, "but as long as you signal when you turn, it's no problem." His point was that he doesn't look for or worry about cars in a new lane or when turning.
He said he'd been driving twenty years like this. This cabby's response about the back window really proves what a foreign friend of mine who drives in Beijing told me about driving here. He related it to downhill skiing. All you have to worry about is the 180° swatch of traffic in front of you. If someone falls down ahead of you or comes skiing across your path you have to avoid them, but you don't have to worry about cutting people off behind you. That seems to be how people commute on the roads here in Beijing, both on bikes and in cars. The whole concept of "checking a blindspot" or checking one's mirrors routinely doesn't exist.
The cabby was sure to mention that at low speeds it really doesn't matter; there's enough reaction time for other drivers to react to your lane changes, and for you to react when driver's in front of you unexpectedly changing lanes. I have to agree with his point, Beijing's traffic speeds, even on the ring roads (the freeways that encircle the city), barely reach more than fifty miles per hour, except well into the night.
It's still interesting to hear such a different perspective regarding driving in this country; I think that in the US a driver's license doesn't simply signify that you know how to operate a motor vehicle, it signifies that you know how to operate a motor vehicle safely and to drive it defensively, a method that we have decided is the safest way to drive. Simply because we say it's the best, does that mean it's the best practice for every culture?
Of course, when a snow falls in the US there are people who don't brush off their back windows, but I thought it was the cabby's response that was interesting. In the US, I would expect most people and especially someone who spends twelve hours a day in their car (as Beijing cabbies routinely do) to be angry with other drivers who don't brush off their back windows. While having this opinion in the US might put me in the majority, perhaps I'm in the minority here in China.
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