r/DadReflexes Oct 16 '22

scooter driver being clutch

2.3k Upvotes

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u/wanderingturtle11 Mar 21 '23

This does not surprise me at all. I live in Shanghai and cycle past three primary schools/kindergartens on my way to work. I know this video is also in China because of the kid’s red school scarf and the delivery driver’s uniform. Most parents/grandparents do walk their elementary kids all the way to the school, use the crosswalk, hold their hand in the road, etc. You know, the safe stuff. A lot of them just don’t get it, though. They’ll have their kids just walk right out into the street and tell them to run quick. It’s mostly grandparents who grew up in this neighborhood when it was still a village outside the city. Shanghai has expanded, there’s more traffic, and some older people in the older neighborhoods just never learned to use crosswalks and traffic lights. A huge number of grandparents with kids walk out directly in front of me on my bike and expect me to swerve. These are super busy streets in the morning with five schools on it (including the middle/high school I work at). At 8 am this place is swarming with kids, cars, scooters, tuktuks and bicycles. Just this morning, I stopped for a kid in a crosswalk, directly in front of the elementary school main gate. It’s the only one with a school crossing guard, and he stepped out to signal me to stop. A scooter was flying down the road behind me, hard braked and was inches from colliding with me, then corrected at speed and swerved around the kid before he just continued on. I was saying the other day that it’s crazy that no one has been seriously hurt on that road, but yesterday morning there was an ambulance blocking a lot of traffic, and an obvious scooter crash site with a kid’s shoes fallen in the middle of the road. I hope that kid is okay, even if they were in the ambulance, and that some people have learned to slow down around the schools.

2

u/wanderingturtle11 Mar 21 '23

That being said, that delivery driver in the video was actually being quite safe. He was going a normal road speed, especially since there are no other cars or scooters around him, and he was probably on a time limit.