Driving Complaints

I hate driving in Wuxi. 

I'll say it again: I hate driving in Wuxi. If there are any regular readers of this blog, they know why. But if you are a new reader, I say this: Wuxi drivers are imprudent, impolite and impractical.

So, is are my latest of my recurring complaints about the local drivers:

• They make left turns without looking. A few times in the last few days, I have had close encounters with drivers in big boat sized BMWs making turns into my path without looking. Hopefully, I startled and scared them with my angry horn honking and close approach to their cars.
  

• They don't know how to merge. There are these ramps one takes to merge onto the elevated roads come into them at an angle. The road by this angle narrows to nothing. A couple times one recent day, I was not merging, but on the lane next to the merging lane (because of heavy traffic), driving past it as it were. Twice I was at a point along the merging lane where I thought that there surely wasn't enough space for a car to try to merge in but a car did try, incredibly to me, to merge in ahead of me or beside me. I had to honk at the car and force it slow down because there was no way I was going to yield because the driver was trying to cut me off and because there was no way I could move to the lane over from us because the traffic was that heavy.
  

• They should use their turn signals more and their horns less. I will say, however, that more and more local drivers are using their turn signals, but far too many still don't. Years of praying the rosary still haven't made me want to tolerate this quirk. And as for using their horns too much: Just today, when I was walking from my wife's office building to the Casa K apartment, I was honked at by a driver as I was crossing at a t-junction. The driver was going to eventually make a turn from the side road to the main road. Now, I say "eventually" because the driver honked at me from quite a distance. He was so far from the intersection that I had time to slowly turn my head to look at him and to watch his car come to a stop. It seemed he wanted me to yield to him so he could barrel onto the main road without looking or making a turn signal!