Traffic on Beijing Ring road

2 min read

The traffic is, to our eyes, total chaos, although they -drivers and pedestrians alike -seem to treat it as if it was the most normal thing in the world, with never a complaint from either side. Perhaps what happens is that the pedestrians are cowed by the constant cacophony of horns which, rather than being a safety precaution used as a last resort, are more like a toy in the hands of adults who amuse themselves by sounding them deafeningly and repeatedly every few moments to clear a route through the traffic and warn pedestrians to get out of the way Nobody can convince me that there is some sort of system in all this which i might be able to get my head around, especially when bikes and motorbikes go so far as to mount the pavements. this means the pedestrian needs to be alert at all times, not just to traffic in the street but also, incongruous as it may seem, to traffic on the pavements. this goes on especially in the working-class districts and the city suburbs, just as you reach the third ring road of the five that currently make up the capital, and which will soon become six. These ring roads are the term used to describe the circular routes which start at the cit centre and stretch outwards towards the periphery.

In the more southerly cities, for example in the westernized and booming world economic centre that is Shanghai, or in Suzhou, home to many canals and gardens, or in the breathtakingly beautiful and romantic Hangzhou, like a picture postcard with its matchless West Lake(Xihu) right in the middle of the city, things are very different. all that has been described up to this point happens above all in Beijing, situated in the north of the county(Bei means north; jing means capital) and the political and administrative centre of th dragon with a hundred faces that is china and which in spite of being the capital, is a city which became modernized much too quickly, surrounded by rural areas which all of a sudden in little more than two swift decadesbecame engulfed in an urban life for which many were totally unprepared Shanghai Bund.