Welcome to Take Beijing Taxi

"Welcome to take Beijing taxi" is the friendly recorded greeting I hear each time a taxi driver starts his (or, unexpectedly often, her) meter. Too bad the ride isn't always as pleasant as the greeting.

That's not to say all Beijing taxi drivers are bad - they're not. Taxi drivers here come in three categories: the good, the incompetent and the cheats. Taxi drivers here, like those everywhere, drive like madmen. That goes without saying (see my last post for a link to disturbingly accurate description of a typical traffic encounter). So, how do the good, the incompetent and the cheats differ?

The Good Driver Good drivers here cover a range from the merely "Wow! I actually got where I wanted to go in less than an hour!" to the "I got where I wanted to go in record time and I almost forgot I was in a taxi!" There are two minimum criteria for a driver to qualify as "good." First, he must actually sort of know his way around more-or-less and second, he must speak Mandarin well enough to understand where I'm asking to go even if my pronunciation isn't 100% perfect.

As to the first criterion, there was a time in the not-so-distant past (i.e. until shortly after I arrived in Beijing) when I would have told you that a good taxi driver knows his city backwards and forwards - that, given any address in the city, he knows exactly where it is and how to get there from his present location. I've lowered my standards. In Beijing a good taxi driver can, given an address, at least get you in the vicinity then follow directions received by phone from someone at your destination. Why the change? Beijing is an immense city covering an area roughly equivalent to the surface area of Mercury (ok...maybe a teeny-tiny exaggeration, but it really is huge). Aside from the 6 ring roads which, as the name suggests, form a series of concentric circles around the city center streets in Beijing follow no discernible organizational pattern. There are major thoroughfares spaced anywhere from a few hundred meters to a mile or more apart. Scattered in between these large streets (and occasionally freeways or toll roads) are a veritable rabbit warren of small streets and alleys some of which may only be long enough to serve one or two buildings while others go on for miles. Streets may or may not be straight, may or may not run in any distinct directions, and can be counted on to change names at frequent but irregular intervals. Just to make matters interesting, streets are frequently designated with a directional notation (e.g. East XYZ St.). In most cities of my acquaintance these directional markers are a good clue about where to look for the street on the map. East ... St. can generally be located on the east side of the city, usually east of some well-defined dividing line (e.g. 5th Ave. in Manhattan). Not so in Beijing. In Beijing the directional designation only tells you that the section of road it designates lies in the indicated direction with respect to some other thing that shares a name with the street. East XYZ St. may be the eastern portion of a street whose other portion is called West XYZ St. even if the entire street lies in the far western part of the city. It could also be the street that forms the eastern border of XYZ neighborhood or runs along the eastern side of XYZ park (again, regardless of where in the city the area it borders happens to lie). Furthermore, Beijing is divided into several districts and street names are not unique across districts. I.e. there may be an XYZ St. in Chaoyang District and another, totally distinct one in Haidian District. The two may never connect, not interesect, be of different shapes, sizes and directions and otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Vastly complicating matters is the fact that Chinese possesses far more characters than syllable sounds (basically each character represents a syllable but there are many, many homophones) even considering each tone/syllable combination as separate (Mandarin uses five different tones or pitch inflections - any given combination of consonants and vowels will take on entirely distinct and unrelated meanings depending on the tone applied). The consequence to Beijing geography of the massive number of homophones is that there can be many streets whose names have identical pronunciations. There are three possibilities for distinguishing among streets with identically pronounced names (not to mention those those that are not identical to Chinese speakers, but are indistinguishable to tone-deaf foreigners!): describe the precise location of the street, write down the name of the street or use the common 'spelling' technique of identifying characters by word association (as in "mama de ma" meaning "the character ma that is used in the well-known word mama"). None of these comes easily to foreigners.

So, given that Beijing has about a million streets (no, that's not an actual fact - just hyperbole) which go every which way, change names constantly, and frequently share names (at least in spoken language), not to mention that many small streets do not appear on maps and have no signs, I figure I've got to cut the taxi drivers a break. Thus the criterion "get you in the vicinity and be able to follow directions from there."

Which brings me to my second criterion "be able to figure out what I'm trying to say." Even here I'll cut the taxi drivers a bit of a break. If I get the tones wrong on street names I really can't complain too much if I end up in the wrong place, after all, I could get the tones perfectly and still end up in the wrong place due to the homophony trick. To qualify as "good" a taxi driver needs to at least be able to interpret innocent mispronounciations of well known destinations (e.g. the airport, train station, Tiananmen Square, etc.).

If "get you in the neighborhood" and "figure out what I'm trying to say if it's a well-known destination" are the minimum to be good, what makes a truly superlative taxi driver? The answer is easy: improvements on both criteria. An outstanding taxi driver can not only get me more-or-less where I'm going, but can get me precisely where I'm going if my destination is a well-known location or on a big street. He can also do so by an efficient route which takes typical traffic patterns (and better actual current traffic activity) into account along with road closures due to construction (frequent), the Olympics (massively annoying just at the moment) or other more mysterious reasons. A top-notch taxi driver is also friendly and communicative. He likes to chat but also understands the challenges of communicating with a foreigner whose Mandarin is as stellar as mine (i.e. barely extends beyond "hello" and "turn left/right here"). He knows how to speak slowly, use simple words, find synonyms when I don't know a word he's used, and elaborate with gestures (but not to the point of making his driving any more dangerous). These rare but fabulous drivers are my very best opportunity to practice and improve my Chinese. They're delighted to have a foreigner in the car, ask me lots of easy questions (where am I from? do I have kids? do I like Beijing? etc.), tell me easy-to-understand stories about themselves and their families, point out landmarks, give me new words ("Hey...do you have those in America? What are they called? Oh...here we call them...or you can also call them..."). I think I actually understood almost 75% of what the guy who drove me home from the train station last night said to me! That's definitely a personal best. The final characteristic that separates the great out from the good is humility. Given the bewildering complexity of navigation in Beijing, even the best sometimes make mistakes. If they are really exceptional they apologize promptly as soon as they realize their error, ask how much the ride ought to cost and stop the meter when it hits the number I give them.

The Incompetent Driver The bulk of Beijing taxi drivers are what I would consider incompetent. If they have any idea at all where I want to go they have no clue how to get there and will often take a route twice as long as the obvious route. For example, suppose I am at a shopping complex on East 3rd Ring Rd. (the ring roads are roughly square, E. X Ring Rd. is the portion of X Ring Rd. that runs north-south along the east edge of the square) and want to go to a location at the NE corner of 3rd Ring Rd. A good taxi driver will go north on E. 3rd Ring Rd. and we'll be there in a quarter of an hour (give or take depending on how far south the start point is and how much traffic there happens to be). An incompetent driver might meander aimlessly around a lot of unidentifiable surface streets before finally arriving or, worse, might head the wrong way on 3rd Ring Rd. If he goes south instead of north on 3rd Ring Rd. he will have to traverse 3+ sides of the square (south to the SE corner, then west to the SW corner, then north the NW corner, then east to the NE corner instead of just north straight to the NE corner). Incompetent taxi drivers also often fail to understand simple directions that even their slightly more adequate cousins can manage (e.g. "take 5th Ring Road to the Badaling Expressway" which is about the easiest thing in the world to do from my apartment). They also have spent the summer driving around a city altered by its new Olympic landscape without having absorbed that all streets that cross through the Olympic zone are closed (and have been for two months or more).

The Cheats Then there are the cheats. There aren't many but they exist. These are the unscrupulous drivers who figure they can take advantage of helpless foreigners. Unlike the incompetent drivers who simply don't know their way around the city well enough to select sensible routes, the cheats will assume that a foreigner a) doesn't know how to get to the destination and/or b) can't communicate well enough to insist on a route and will take the opportunity to select a long, slow route guaranteed to rack up a hefty fare. I figure another week and I will no longer fall victim to the cheats on the routes I travel frequently (e.g. to/from work) and a few more weeks after that and I should escape their clutches entirely. I know the route to/from work well now, but am still not quite confident enough in my Mandarin to question why a driver isn't following the route I know. I'm close though. A little bit longer to feel confident challenging a driver who seems to be taking a questionable route when I can't give precise directions for a better one.

And there you have it...taxi drivers in a nutshell (okay...a very big nut!). The vehicles themselves are a story for another day.

Welcome to read Beijing blog...that's all for now.