Having just crossed to the north side of  Dongzhimen Wai I turn east nearing the eight mile mark of what would become a personal best 15 mile run. A few strides and I hear an anticipatory scream, kind of like what I’ve heard from Yang when she thought one of the kids was about to have a bad accident. I turn to my right as I hear tires screeching. And then a car hitting an electric scooter which goes flying and a 50ish man dropping to the asphalt.  Traffic stops and the scene plays out in a predictable pattern, predictable if you’ve lived here a while. The man lies on the ground, on his side, and is still. No one moves to help him. Passerby's stare and then most continue on with whatever they were doing. Traffic starts to flow again. I look thinking I should help but it also means I need to cross a busy street to reach the man. And if I am really honest with myself I have to admit that my inclination is not to get involved. I decide that if there is blood, then I will go to try to stop it but I see none. After a minute or so the man driving the car that hit the scooter gets out and looks at the fallen man, inspecting him a bit from a distance. He picks up his cell phone, hesitates a bit, and then gets back inside his call apparently to wait for the police. After another minute and with man still mostly still I continue on with my run.

So why didn’t I or anyone rush up to the man to help? It’s complicated, or simple depending on how you look at it. If you hit someone with your car here the law says you are responsible for the cost of his injuries for the rest of his life (this law has caused most foreign companies to require car allowance to be spent on a driver vs. an employee driven car). So if the victim can no longer provide for his family, you will. So when a car hits a pedestrian or cyclist here you will often see the victim lying on the ground not moving when they are not really injured at all. It is a negotiating technique to get an on the spot payment of a few hundred or maybe thousand RMB. Sometimes the victim will even sit up, blocking traffic, waiting for his payment. Often the police will need to facilitate the agreement before traffic is cleared, and this is even for the most minor scraps. This case was clearly a much more serious accident, but how serious no one knew so no one dared intervene. I had once seen a similar accident where a car slammed in to a scoter making a horrible noise and the rider went crashing to the ground. In that case the car was a taxi and the driver got out of the car and yelled at the scoter’s driver to get up, that he wasn’t hurt that bad.

Doing a fair amount of walking, running, biking, and driving in this city I can clearly identify who is to blame for all these accidents. Everyone. As a driver, pedestrians and cyclists often pay no regard to you or the lights. More often than not, when I wait at a traffic stop that doesn’t have crossing guards and the light turns green there is a person walking or biking in front of my car. Just tonight, I was waiting to make a jump left when a teenager on a mountain bike flashers in my left eye just as the light turns green. We are both lucky that I am able to hold up.

Drivers also have no clue and this goes for the “professionals”, novices, and everyone in between. The main rule of driving is if it makes sense for you, than why not do it. So on the freeway yesterday we see a car parked on the shoulder of an overpass with young mom holding her baby out the car’s back door, facing traffic, so the baby can pee as cars wizz by. People make u-turns on freeway onramps if the freeway’s traffic looks backed up as witnessed by Yang today. People stop in the middle of the freeway and talk on the cell phone making sure they get directions or just to pick someone up at an onramp. On city streets cars often overrun the bike lanes. Once when this occurred I was forced to the sidewalk and then on the sidewalk I was forced to the side by a car who decided to claim the sidewalk as well. Another time biking I made a left turn into a bike lane only to be confronted by a bus going the opposite direction of the said bike lane.

I’ve had two of life/death panics with the kids that will burn in my memory forever. One was actually last year on the Alaska cruise when I lost track of Elisa for a moment and then saw her pulling herself up a three story railing. The other was on a bike ride with Yang and Aidan when Aidan was about three. Aidan was on the back of Yang’s bike as Yang biked through an intersection, me following. The light was red and Yang did not look to her left or right, someone “understandable” because the right side of the intersection which we were on was kind of hidden by trees. A car came flying from the right, Yang and Aidan looking straight ahead. I was sure it was going to hit them head on. It didn’t and Yang barely noticed. ‘

On Sunday, while I didn’t see the older man enter the intersection on Dongzhimen Wai, I believe it was a similar case. His light was red and in this case it is a very busy boulevard type street (thing El Camino Real) that he strode into.