If you ever drive a car in Shanghai, you will very quickly learn a new way to interpret a yellow traffic light.

If you do what you would have done in, say, Hong Kong, and slow down in preparation for stopping at a yellow, you'd be quickly and noisily reminded by the drivers in the cars behind that you had committed a cardinal sin.

For irrespective of what they were taught in driving schools, mainland drivers are apt to regard a yellow light as a signal for them to floor the accelerator to charge across the line before the lights turn red. This results in frequent logjams at busy intersections as cars clog the flow of traffic from all directions. This apparently prompted the government to do the sensible thing in traffic management and introduce a heavy penalty, including fines and a point deduction for those drivers that run a yellow light.

The new regulation that came into force last month unsurprisingly has stirred a storm of protest from motorists around the country. Despite the clarity of the rule that required motorists to slow down at a yellow light, many exasperated motorists expressed their despair on the Internet, complaining that they found following that instruction too complicated, confusing and even dangerous.

Dangerous? So it seems.

There have been numerous reports in different cities that cars slowing for a yellow light in compliance with the new regulations were rear-ended by the following cars whose impatient drivers were simply following reflexes derived from years of practice in the art of survival in the mainland road jungle. On the mean streets of cities big and small, civility is a sign of weakness that no self-respecting motorist will tolerate.

Some city governments are already having cold feet about imposing on their tough-minded and unyielding motorists something as mildly civilized as the yellow-light rule. To placate angry motorists, Shanghai municipal government has said that it will delay enforcing the rule by letting offenders off for now. Even the Ministry of Public Security that adopted the yellow-light rule and put it into practice on Jan 1 circulated a notice on Jan 6 suspending the point-reduction penalties. Such a compromise is in danger of rendering this necessary traffic rule, like so many others, unenforceable. The point is, if the authority is not showing the resolve to enforce the new rule now, they will have a much harder time doing so in future because by then nobody will have any respect for that rule.

A young colleague told me about her experience in obtaining a driving license in Shanghai. It seems that the traffic rules in Shanghai are as strict and comprehensive, if not more so, than in Hong Kong or most other major cities. But when you try to cross the intersection at Huaihai Road Central and Xizang Road during the rush hours, you will wonder if any of those rules apply on Shanghai's streets.

That intersection is populated by traffic lights intended to guide motorists in every direction. But if a pedestrian is naive enough to follow the pedestrian lights in crossing the street there, his or her chance of being knocked down by a charging vehicle is very high indeed. The safest way to cross that treacherous intersection is to wind through the stationary cars that aren't going anywhere in the logjam.

Many motorists may be scornful of traffic rules and have little sense of road manners, but they aren't the meanest junkyard dogs that pose the biggest threat to pedestrians. That title must go to the many thousands of desperados on electric cycles that are appropriately dubbed the "silent killers" by the public they terrorize.

Shanghai has achieved so much in trying to realize its dream of becoming a world-class city. It should have the will and courage to force motorists and cyclists to observe sensible rules that seek to make this city safer for everyone.

(China Daily 01/15/2013 page8)