A Chinese bus can be considered a motor vehicle only in the loosest sense because, while it has an engine, the engine plays a vanishingly small role in the propulsion of the vehicle. The reason is that a Chinese bus driver drives as if the current tank of fuel is the last tank available on the face of the Earth. As if his fate in the afterlife hinges on how well he conserves this tank. As if burning more fuel than needed was a counter-revolutionary act.

He eases the vehicle into motion gingerly. If the chi is good, he eschews first gear altogether, using telekinesis to accelerate the bus into range of second or third. He never revs the engine more than the bare minimum, and prefers coasting to driving. If the next stop is in visual range, he won't touch the gas pedal. A rear-end collision is cause for joy as precious kinetic energy is transferred from the sucker in back.

This attitude is shared by everybody on the road, even the taxi drivers. China may be the only place on Earth where passengers urge taxi drivers to go _faster_. Posted speed limits are wholly superfluous (which is good because none are posted). PetroChina's gargantuan ziggaraut stations dot the urban landscape, but their function must be largely ceremonial as no vehicles ever sully their pavement.

In Hong Kong, things are different. Sure, there's a theoretical limit to petroleum extraction. Perhaps internal combustion pollutes. And it's entirely possible that greenhouse gas emmision will lead to flooding. But so what? They'll find some new oil or some new way to drill; they always do. The busses are brand new and pollute less every year; nowadays they don't even spew black smoke. And flooding would only affect the bottom few floors, and in Hong Kong nobody's building anything but skyscrapers these days. There isn't even any land _zoned_ for less than fifty floors. And that's by the British system, not counting the ground floor.

(In Vancouver, with many immigrants and world travelers, the new hotels must take into account all sorts of different superstitions. Not only no floor thirteen, but also no four, no fourteen, no forty through forty-nine; nothing with the unlucky numeral four. In the logical conclusion to the trend, you will ride up the elevator up, step through the open door, and plummet to your doom because there are no longer any floors at all.)

In Hong Kong, bus drivers don't care about wasting fuel. No, in Hong Kong they know that something else is far more precious, far more deserving of conservation: _time_. Every second spent on a bus is a second closer to death. Something will get worked out with the oil, but you'll never get your lost time back.

To this end, a Hong Kong double-decker bus accelerates faster, brakes harder, and corners neater than anything ever built by anyone named Enrico, Enzo, or Ferruchio. Hong Kong bus drivers don't hang pictures of Mao from their mirrors. They hang pictures of Michael Schumacher or Mario Andretti. (This, of course, is a figure of speech. For safety reasons, they aren't allowed to hang anything from the mirrors. In fact, for safety reasons, there are no mirrors.)

When a bus pulls away from the curb it leaves a patch of rubber three bus-lengths long, which coincidentially is the distance to the next stop, so the last third of the patch is typically generated by skidding to a halt. If you are carrying any packages, stay on the first floor, because climbing the spiral staircase demands at least two free hands for the bright yellow handrails. And if the bus is moving at the time, you'll be performing a maneuver similar to climbing through an airlock in Mir while plummeting out of orbit over Australia, and the best advice is to simply hold tight and aim for Rupert Murdoch's old swimming pool.