No harm, no foul
Today I saw a man carrying a ten foot ladder. Riding a bicycle. In rush hour traffic. Which means he was riding in a crowded bike lane with cars weaving this way and that, including into the bike lane. The traffic here really has to be seen (or, better, ridden in) to be believed. The drivers are very skilled–they know exactly how wide and long their cars are and they use every inch. There’s no real concept of right of way; it’s only a suggestion. Yet it all works pretty well. In the US, we have rules. If you follow the rules, something bad is less likely to happen. Problems often occur when one person follows the rules and another doesn’t. Inefficiencies are introduced when people don’t really know the rules about right of way and just try to be nice, like a four-way stop near my house where it’s not uncommon to be last to the intersection and still have the other three cars wait. Or the unwritten “only one car in the intersection at a time” rule that folks in Ballard seem to follow. When you’re traffic control mechanisms are rule based, you run into problems when people think they know the rules but don’t–many people think erroneously that in Washington State it is illegal to honk your horn except in case of emergency. These things would never happen in China.
In China, they have rules, too, but they use them only as guidelines. What matters is not whether some authority has said you can or can’t do something, but rather whether or not something bad will happen if you do something. If nothing bad will happen, then you do it. If something bad might happen, you may still do it, but you try to reduce the likelihood of the bad outcome by, say, honking your horn to let the driver in the car next to you know you are about to cut him off. Or by flashing your lights to let the car that is about to cut you off know that you’re going to step on it to keep him out. It’s a little like sailing–you’re supposed to follow the right of way rules, but even if the other guy doesn’t, it is your responsibility to avoid a collision. In China, this is taken to such an extreme that collision-avoidance is a constant state. In this country, personal responsibility is more important than government guidance when driving.
The best example of this I saw (even better than the fact that a man can ride a bike down a busy street while carrying a ten foot ladder) was a car that swerved into the bike lane, honked the bikes out of the way, accelerated, honked again, and merged back into the traffic lane by cutting off a car. A police car. With its lights flashing.
Both cars continued on their way without any further interaction.