Fire Motorcycle

I wish I had gotten my camera for this. I saw a bright red motorcycle flying by on the street, with flashing lights, and wondered what the heck it was, until I saw the Chinese character for "fire" and realized this was a chief heading to the scene.

I think the Chinese traffic makes something like this absolutely necessary, for two reasons. 1) It's often as crowded as Manhattan. 2) Chinese drivers simply do not respond to emergency lights of any sort. The oddest part about the second part is that so many aspects of Chinese culture require much more subversion to authority than American culture (school drills, random searches [yup, seen them], traffic wardens, security personnel everywhere, and lots of restrictions on personal freedom by the gov't for the olympics), and yet the authority vested in the emergency response teams seems to have no effect.

Anyway, the motorcycle was small enough to weave through traffic to some extent, and take bike roads. I suspect that's exactly what it's designed for.