Sidewalks & parking
This is the start of a series of newsletters on the various uses for Chinese sidewalks.
You might ask yourself, how can I write an essay about sidewalks in China. After all, what can be so interesting about public sidewalks?
In Chinese cities, space is scarce so public sidewalks is a resource that has been pressed into benefiting several conflicting needs.
One of those needs is providing parking spots for scooters, bicycles and motor vehicles.
The major arterial roads in the large Chinese cities don’t have cars parking on the sidewalks but the sidewalks on the collector roads are fair game.
Bicycle/scooter parking
This is a street in downtown Nanjing, a major Chinese city. The sidewalk is full of scooters and rental bicycles. Rental bicycles are all over southern China.
The white van is picking up some of the white rental bicycles which is great because it will make more parking room for more rental bicycles and scooters.
This sidewalk in Nanjing is blocked by wood crates, bicycles and a parked scooter. There is just enough room for pedestrians to walk in single file.
These parked bicycles and scooters in downtown Nanjing take up all the space on the sidewalks so the pedestrians have to share the bike lanes with “Silent Death”.
That is what the Chinese call electric scooters because you can't hear them racing up from behind you or shooting out from side streets in front of you .
As I walk down this street in Nanjing, I see a half-dozen scooters and a few rental bicycles in front of a restaurant making it impossible for me to stay on the sidewalk so off onto the road I must go.
In Quanzhou, the sidewalks are not as wide as in Shenzhen but there still would be room for the merchants to put displays out on the sidewalks if the bicycles and electric scooters didn't need the space for parking.
Here is another photograph of a downtown street corner in Quanzhou. There is so much going on here.
Because scooters and bicycles are parked on the sidewalks, the pedestrians have been squeezed out onto the busy roads. The man dressed in black is making his way towards the sidewalk with many others following behind him.
See the man in front driving the blue scooter? I was always half-amused and half-appalled by the electric bikes racing along the roads and sidewalks with most of the drivers failing to wear helmets but never failing to take a call on their mobile phones.
Gotta park my car somewhere
As I travelled to northern China, I found that drivers didn’t seem to have anywhere else to park their cars, so the sidewalks became parking lots.
Cars are king in downtown Jinzhou. Nature abhors a vacuum and so do Chinese drivers. No parking available on the sidewalk? Not a problem. Good thing the curb lane on this busy downtown street was available.
On another busy downtown street, the pedestrians take to the road as the sidewalk is blocked by parked cars.
As I walked down this street in Jinzhou, I could see that the cars park on the sidewalks and the people walk on the roads. It's more convenient this way I suppose.
(Notice the tall church in the background.)
It was very common in Jinzhou to see cars completely blocking the sidewalks.
Across the street, it was the same. Cars, motorbikes and goods claim the sidewalk.
Hundreds of miles to the east, it is the same in Dandong.
These vehicles are blocking the sidewalk in front of a kindergarten. The parents will be bringing their children to school soon.
On a busy shopping day, this car found an excellent parking spot just off Tongzhi Street in downtown Changchun.
This street in Changchun sits at the north end of the #54 streetcar line.
I found this to be an interesting street for a couple of reasons. It is just about all that is left of "old China" in this area. The rest of this district has been demolished and re-developed so I don't think this street will last long.
The single-level shops have cargo trikes sharing the sidewalks with vans and food carts while the pedestrians share the road with the cars.