Changsha buses
When I lived there in 1999 - 2000, Changsha had a pretty good, well-developed bus network. It was quite a pleasure to discover one could simply walk down to the nearest bus stop and expect a bus heading your direction to be along fairly soon, with no need to worry about the terrible mix of bus timetables and real world traffic.
I saw very early in my time in Changsha people in the railway station area selling maps of the city. Entirely in Chinese, but that was all good. Maps are graphic, I've loved maps since I was a wee lad, and the bus routes were marked on the maps. Also, a good way to learn a few more characters, at least as they pertained to local place names.
A lot of the buses back then had front-mounted engines. A lot of the drivers were tiny, tiny women. I mean no disrespect to anyone when I write this: I was forever amazed that these tiny women were wrestling these buses with huge bus-sized diesel engines mounted right over the front wheels through Changhsa's intense traffic at speed.
One day I and two colleagues decided to ride a bus to the far end of its route just to see what was there. We chose a route whose buses had flat fares, so we could just drop our money in the box and ride. As the bus neared the end of its route and passenger numbers dwindled, the bus sped up. At one point I turned to my colleagues and suggested we might get off at the next stop. Their response was that if I was scared the driver must be going hella fast.
We reached the end of the route unscathed. Somehow. We alighted and walked back the way the bus had brought us. Was it worth it? Well, no, it was just more expanse of suburban Changsha, nothing special. The only thing of note was the firefighters sent out on a run. But yes, because we were walking through a slice of the city we otherwise wouldn't have seen. And sure, it was nothing special, but "nothing special" makes up the largest portion of any city. If you want to know a place, you have to know its "nothing special". Even if it means a ride on a bus whose driver thinks he's the stunt driver for a Hollywood car chase scene.
One day I was on a bus when we got caught in a huge traffic jam around one of the interchanges along the main road from the railway station to the main bridge over the river. A bunch of the bus drivers, including the bus I was on, decided to use the pedestrian/bicycle underpass to get across the interchange and past the traffic. After that day, every time I used one of these underpasses, I reached up and touched the top with my hand - I did not need to stretch or stand on tippy-toes to do this. To this day I still can not understand how a convoy of buses managed to squeeze through that underpass. The laws of physics would seem to object to such driving. And yet somehow, it happened.
It's been 26 years since I was last in Changsha - well, apart from a train ride through about a month after my departure, on the way from Guilin to Zhengzhou. As we rumbled through Changsha I stared out the window feeling a certain amount of nostalgia and regret at having taken a new job up north.
Changsha now has a subway system, which opened in 2014 - by which point I had been settled in Beijing for several years, but already plotting the return to Aotearoa. I wonder how the bus system would've changed over the last 26 years?