Traffic

I have finally seen the bad effects of Chinese driving; since last month I started to work for another school outside Chengdu and it's on the way back from there I have seen it: I've only been there two times so far but I've already seen 6-7 accidents of which at least 2-3 seemed really serious, we also had a really close call the first time.

A really scary looking one was one of those boxlike cars they are driving around in here, they are quite slim and high and apparently they tip over quite easily, the one we saw had been hit from the side by a car coming down a slope (from a bridge) and when we passed it in the other direction it lay upside-down in the middle of the street.

We saw another bad one today where a bike had been hit quite seriously by a car and there were ambulance and stuff (you usually don't see any ambulance actually), Sam said the ankle looked totally twisted.

And of course our own near incident, it was probably the closest thing to death I've ever been; we were driving along this super wide (like 5-6 files) road that has these giant light-guarded intersections - just imagine 5-6 files in each direction and then a crossing of a similar road, basically 12 files crossing 12 files. The traffic was really light at that time and for some reason the lights were turned off. Our driver was just going on straight ahead and I saw the other car coming in from the left well in advance and saw that we were basically on collision course with it, it's a really open area and I thought it impossible to miss it but apparently our driver did. When he finally did spot it it would have been to late if we had actually had a collision course, I think it wasn't more than 1dm from a big crash, see two cars coming in 100km/h in a perpendicular angle, someone is bound to die if it hits, luckily it didn't.

I figure that accidents in the cities aren't really that severe, it's usually a lost bumper or something like that, basically because the speed is too low, it's seldom faster then 30km/h and very often it's just a total stand still. I'm scared when we go outside like that though!