CATHERINE RIGOD (journalism major) writes:
First off, let me begin by explaining that in Shanghai the person-per-pavement ratio is pretty unbalanced. The city streets are filled with cars, trucks, vans, mopeds, bicycles, small animals ... and let’s not forget people. And if there was a pecking order to all this chaos, the king of the urban jungle would have to be the bicycle.
While Shanghai has definitely acknowledged its dense population by creating separate bike lanes to be shared by mopeds and bicycles alike, maneuvering through this city has never felt more like a video game to me than now. So it’s no surprise that in the reality version of a game on the Nintendo Wii system my number-one arch nemesis has got to be the bicycle.
I myself am a cyclist back home and I have a lot of friends who are even working as bike messengers, so you would think that I would be really excited to see all the cyclists working and getting around Shanghai. However, in reality here, I'm more inclined to see them as a possible cause of an early death than to rally them on in some sort of international sports camaraderie.
If I could cash in the number of times that I have almost been taken out here by a bicycle I might just run out and buy a villa. Cyclists in Shanghai apparently have places to be that are more important than the rest of us, because their bicycles just don’t stop. Period. They don’t yield to pedestrians, obey traffic lights, or back down when a truck is coming full-speed toward them. Now, the bikes here aren’t terribly fast, and I’ve seen one road bike in the entire time I’ve been here. The majority of bikes are old rusty cruisers or mountain bikes whose riders seem to never switch gears or raise their seats to their correct heights.
But bikes here are not a luxury item; they’re not for a weekend hobby and not for the kids to have fun and joy ride around the block with. Bikes here are a mode of transportation, and like it or not in China, they’re going to be around en mass. And when it gets down to it, that’s fine with me. I just wish I could stop and appreciate it all instead of having to play a game of personal Frogger every day.
Catherine Rigod is a senior in the journalism department.
