Push The Bus, We’re Going Backwards in Time

I saw passengers pushing a huge public bus today here in Beijing. It had nothing to do with the olympics or nationalism or the Sichuan earthquake, or any of that. The bus, like many here in Beijing, runs connected to an electric grid with wires strung across the city, was diverted because half the road was being repaved, and lost contact with the wires above. It had to be pushed to regain power, and its passengers were the only people available to do the work.

I recall my first visit to China in 1988, when the country had almost no cars, and the streets were so filled with bicycles that it was dangerous to cross the road since you would get hit by an errant bike rider. The buses then were all connected to electric grids in every town, more so than today, and every time I turned my head toward the sun, it was blocked by a sea of wires.

Today, there are fewer wires, but they are still there. China now has more money to buy gas for its fleet of buses, so more of them are modern and run on fuel, not electricity. The remaining electric powered buses, though, still ply the streets, and are occasionally a big headache, like the one that I saw today.

Electric buses in a day and age when gasoline is so expensive may seem like a brilliant, forward thinking idea. I suppose if the plan were well conceived, they would be. But, most in China date from the 1950s, and forward thinking wasn’t in the vocabulary then, or now really.

So, they’ve become a major headache. Streets now are being redirected, and repaved, but the electric grid lines can’t move, of course. Traffic is more intense now than ever, the roads more rocky than ever, and the buses frequently lose contact with the electric grid. So, the driver and the ticket collector stop traffic, get out from the bus, unhook safety strings that are connected to each of the two skyward pointing connectors to the electric grid, and from an angle 15 meters from the buss, use the ropes to guide the electric connectors back toward the electric grid in the sky.

There’s nothing you can do if you are in traffic behind an electric bus when this happens. There’s nothing you can do when you are on an electric bus when this happens, unless of course the bus really is redirected, and needs a push, like the one I saw yesterday. When that happens, assuming you are strong enough to walk, you know your job is to get off the bus, together with the other passengers, and push.