trafficking in metaphors

Why are roads and traffic the fat soft fruit hanging off the lower branches of the tree of social metaphor? Recently the Taipei City Government announced a shocking new plan, which was to start enforcing the traffic laws (curses, curses, curses, I do not have the link. But trust me. A reputable newspaper.). Not all at once, they don’t want to make everyone paranoid and cause utter chaos, but in stages, over the course of several months. I think it was two stages, over the course of four or six months. The other day I was idling in the white painted square at the head of the lane that is the place for scooters, waiting at a red light where a smaller street intersects the larger street I was riding on. I was on the far right of a three-lane road (lanes are purely optional, obviously, but you get an idea of the breadth). In back of me was one of those little blue goods-transporting trucks (the surest sign of some deep connection between Taiwan and China, I think, because they have the exact same trucks on the mainland). We’re sitting at the red light and we’re sitting at the red light and there’s nobody coming and there's nobody coming and finally the truck just pulls out and turns left, from the right lane, on a red light. The light turns green and I keep riding along and eventually I need to go into an alley. The alley is one-way the wrong way, but it’ll take forever for me to get where I need to go legally, so I just take it anyway. I always do; everybody always does: everybody seems to have agreed that scooters are actually bicycles (and cars are actually scooters). So I get there fine like I always do and a little while later I pull out onto a large street to go home, and run into another red light.

I think I’ve mentioned somewhere before that I think Kali, the goddess of destruction and creation, would be an appropriate patron for Taipei traffic. It isn’t quite as awesome as Nanjing, where I once saw a car take a left turn into a space in between two oncoming cars, but the general idea as far as I’ve been able to figure it out (and note that I am still alive) is that everyone watches out for what’s going on in front of them and has no obligations in any other direction. In cases of sideways movement and other unclear situations, right of way is determined by precedence, which means that if you can get a wheel in edgewise you have the right of way even if everyone else has to slam on their breaks; no one will for instance honk at you for something like that. Unless you’re a scooter, in which case it’s your problem: scooters, Jennifer says, are like cockroaches. I take a less grody view and hold that we are like ants: at any large intersection after the traffic finally stops for a red light, you’ll notice that the scooters never really stay still. They wind their way up, zigzagging between the cars, nosing along the gutter, sometimes riding up on the sidewalk, to the painted white square at the front of the lane. At really busy intersections it’s a pretty amazing sight: maybe four or five lanes of cars and this endless procession of helmeted heads wiggling, squiggling, sneaking through between other people’s exhaust pipes and rearview mirrors.

So that’s what I’m doing when I pull out onto this large street and hit a red light, I’m wiggling along, watching the ants settle like sand and keeping on the lookout for new spaces as they open up until I finally make it all the way up front to the white square, and then I notice the cop. He’s standing at the intersection waving a girl on a scooter at the very front of the square over to the sidewalk where he is, and then he’s yelling at her. Turns out that she had wiggled and squiggled her way up to the white square but hadn’t stopped soon enough, so that about half of her scooter was over the white line marking its outer edge. The edges of the white square are nowhere near the part of the intersection where cars actually cross; but the point is that she has violated the traffic laws by edging out in front of the white square, and the cop writes her a ticket. So, I guess “meaningless universals that we can catch just by standing there” would be the first implementation phase of the traffic law enforcement plan?