A short story from Kunming

I wrote this in another forum and decided to include it here.

One thing that is weird is the wrong way rule. All traffic is to stay to the right, including pedestrians; however, much of the traffic, by choice of the driver, rider, or walker, travels on the left side. When on the right (operating normally) and facing a wrong way driver or rider, both vehicles avoid to the left instead of the right, as is done by vehicles that are normally coming at you.

An application to the rule would be this, you are riding on the right side of the road in the fenced bike lane (a fence exists to keep the bike lane from becoming another traffic lane), or the sidewalk (and the side walks are practicality motorways), and a motor scooter is coming at you; you both are to avoid by veering left. This is the opposite of what you would do in the motorway.

Short riding on the sidewalk story (an example of poor etiquette on both my part, I was walking, and the riders). I was walking down a sidewalk in Kunming, PR China, about a month ago with my daughter. This woman was motoring down the sidewalk while talking on her cell phone and was very absorbed in her conversation. She was so absorbed that she was bump steering. By this I mean that whenever she hit a pedestrian, it forced her into a wobbling correction and she continued down the sidewalk this way; riding her scooter as if it were a pinball and never breaking her attention from the conversation.

I was already in a foul mood, due to having hurt myself in a bike crash the day before, and as I saw I was on the course of her collisions I repositioned my leftover curry-tomato soup from dinner for "the accidental flying drop" and told my daughter, "if she hits me she's going down." This she saw. I do not know if she locked in on the soup (she had a white and pastel dress on, it wouldn't have looked good with soup) or the stance; whatever she saw, she came to a complete stop, right there, and waited for me to pass.

The fact that she did see me indicated that she was just rude and lazy, not inattentive. Several of the people she had bumped off of also saw this too, they seemed to approve. I use this as an example of what not to do, within the constraints of good etiquette, probably on both of our parts.