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In February 2006 my wife and I traveled to China to adopt a baby girl into our family. The adoption trip was a wonderful opportunity to observe and learn about the Chinese culture and for me, a transportation engineer, to learn about the China transportation system. This article is a commentary of our experiences and observations, from a transportation point of view, while in China. The international adoption process in China requires a two week in-country stay and the beginning of our Chinese journey was in Beijing. The 14 hour flight from Chicago to Beijing was quite a trip and during the flight I found myself trying to estimate just how much fuel was actually left in the fuel tanks. After landing in Beijing we found our guides in the main terminal, gathered our luggage and headed to our snazzy tour bus. Immediately upon leaving the Beijing airport I could tell we were not in Kansas (errr Nebraska) anymore. Several things were starkly different about the transportation system. It wasn’t necessarily that the roads look that much different. Definitely the signs were a little different, but really the differences were in how the roadways were used by the drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians. One of the first things the guides told us when we got on the bus was that the bus driver we have is one of the best and “very safe”. Within the first 10 minutes of driving you could hear the collective gasps for air and “oh my goshes” as we narrowly missed hitting pedestrians that were crossing the street or a motorcycle would cross in front of the bus being missed by five feet as we were traveling 35 mph (no exaggeration) or our bus driver would want to change lanes and would just start to merge into a lane that was full of vehicles. The drivers in the target lane would recognize the encroachment and swerve out of the way since the bus as bigger. The guides must just laugh to themselves at the foreigners that come to China and gasp at the craziness of the driving compared to where they are from. I found every drive we took to be thoroughly interesting because of the tremendous differences in how the Chinese utilize their transportation infrastructure and the interesting sites along the way. How about a picture tour of some of the sights:
Changeable message sign. Seemed a little small to me. I wondered if the locals could read the sign.
Quite a mixture of modes in this picture and take a look at that green light on the pedestal pole…
I found that same signal head in another spot in Beijing. (note - both my travel group and the Chinese folks nearby were a little bugged about me taking a picture of the pedestrian signal – made me feel right at home)
This is a picture in a downtown area. There were lots of mopeds and lots of bicycles.
We did even get to see a few of the bicycle taxis and rickshaws.
Some of the guide signs included English text and of course everything was metric.
What about pavement markings? Yes there were even some instances of Chinese words on the pavement. Very gutsy of the marking technicians to pull this off if you ask me. Here was the biggest transportation surprise of the trip:
Yes that does say “toll gate”. When we went past this there were no cars in it. I was trying o figure out why there would be toll facilities in China (communist government). I don’t have an answer quite yet. Another neat thing that was going on in China was preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games. On many of our drives around Beijing we could see construction taking place with huge signs noting the 2008 Olympics. There is great pride in China about hosting the Olympics in 2008.
This Olympic sign has a countdown time on it. The 909 signifies the number of days left until the beginning of the games (as of Feb 2006). Also during the trip we were able to see many signs that just did not make the Chinese-English translation as smoothly as might have been hoped. Enjoy… A sign at the Great Wall. Good call.
This sign is in front of a vertical statue that stands 80 feet tall. At some point someone must have thought it would be fun to climb it. The thought never crossed my mind.
Another Great Wall sign. I’m still looking in the MUTCD for this one.
Anyone that has been to the Great Wall knows that all you do there is climb. The stairs are at a 70 degree angle in some places. Well after the first three days of sightseeing in Beijing we flew to Nanchang where we were united with our new daughter. At this point in the trip my interests turned to our baby girl and I wasn’t much of a transportation sight seer anymore. We stayed in Nanchang for three more days and then flew to Guangzhou to complete the remainder of the paperwork before flying home. A note on the Chinese airline flights – they were quite good. The pilots seemed to be very skilled and the landings they made were some of the smoothest I have experienced in fifteen years of airline flights. One final picture since you might be interested to see the little girl we went to bring home:
Feel free to contact me with any questions about this article.
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