Recently, I began my driving in USA.
I did not have any experience of driving in China. So, if I said anything wrong about driving in China, please tell me, I appreciate it.
Driving here is easy, I think here.
It is easy to get a licence. For the knowlege exam, there are 40 questions, you only need to answer 30 correctly. After that, you get a driving permission, so that you can drive with a person who has a licence sitting beside you. After practising, you can register for a road test and a maneuverability test. The first one is driving on the road, the second one is driving forward and backward through five cones. It is not difficult either, there is no camera, only one official sitting beside you.
The total cost of test here is about $60.
A difference is, there are three-lane road here (2-way). The middle lane is for turning to both directions before you get to an intersection.
I saw many people moving on when the light is red. This may be different from China. When one wants to make a left turn, he or she moves on when the light is green, but the driver can not turn, because cars are moving from the other side of her or his road. When the light turns red, the cars on his or her road stop, while the cars on the perpendicular road still do not move, so the driver turns left at this time. Theoretically, this is illegal. But, at least in this city, there is nealy no camera at the intersection, no traffic police, so, it is still safe to do it. And it is accepted by most people.
What will people do if the traffic lights fail?
Cars will wait behind the wating lines, then cross the intersection in turn from all the four directions. They are really reasonable. This happens at intersections where there is no traffice lights, but Stop signs.
There are more stop signs here, at intersections without lights. When you see such a sign, a stop is necessary. Then you look at all the directions to make sure moving is safe.
More roads here. The road density is much higher than most cities in China, this may be the first reason why traffic jam is not common here. the narrowest distance between two roads may be dozens of meters. So, at one place here, the distance between two sets of traffic lights is only about 20 meters.
Most people are in vehciles. So, there are only a few pedestrians. This makes driving much safer and easier. The speed limit in most places in the city area is 35 mile/hour, you can drive at 40 mile/hour, that is about 65 km/hour. In many cities in China, this speed may be too fast.
Cheap gasoline. The present price of the regular gas is about $3.80 per gallon. One gallon is 3.78 litters. So, often you can see, there is only one person in a car, and old ladies even drives an SUV.
Have a nice day! |