Hello everyone,
Today I am going to write about traffic in Kunming. I find the act of crossing the street endlessly fascinating here. The relationship between vehicles and pedestrians is subtly different from what I am used to. In the USA we have a very clearly defined set of rules about who belongs where: cars and bikes on the street, pedestrians on the sidewalk; at crossings pedestrians have priority but otherwise stay out of the way of the faster and heavier vehicles. As a culture we have ceded ownership of the streets to cars and trucks and other vehicles. In Kunming that social compact has not yet been made. I imagine it is because cars have not been on the scene long enough to have become the entrenched inevitability they are in the USA. Being relatively new they do not have any natural supremacy in the order of the road, they may be new participants but they don’t have special status. Naturally cars, trucks, bicycles, anything faster or heavier than an unladen human, have primacy in the streets, but it is a primacy borne of a Darwinian instinct for survival and not one borne of an explicit social arrangement. Everyone on the street has equal standing, in principle, if a space becomes available however briefly. In Kunming, a pedestrian is not limited to the sidewalk, she uses the sidewalk only as a convenience when there is an obstruction in the road: the two are equal and interchangeable with no mental boundary between them. In the USA walking in the street is only done with a feeling of danger, however slight, and a sense of transgression, even on the loneliest street with no traffic at all. In Kunming there may actually be greater danger to the pedestrian as she shares the road with every kind of vehicle, but she does not feel it as such and travels the street with total confidence under and conditions: with a sense of total comfort and abandon she walks where she will and the street belongs to her.