How do the taxis work?
A glowing red sign on the dashboard or up by the windshield indicates an available cab. If the drivers won’t stop, you may be standing in a no-pickup zone—search the area for an official cab stand, or try a side street. The chance of getting a cabbie who can speak fluent English is, optimistically, 1 in 500. (Many drivers, in from the provinces, don’t even speak particularly good Mandarin.) In taxis, as elsewhere in the service sector, Beijing’s push for remedial foreign-language instruction has trained people to converse the way automated voice-recognition phone trees do—stray at all from a narrow script, and you’re stuck. A taxi passes the flower bed outside the Beijing Olympic Athletes Village The best way to get where you’re going is to have someone write out your destination in Chinese beforehand and to carry a cell phone, so you can dial the place you’re going and have someone there talk to the driver. The latter is perfectly normal behavior. Under no circumstances should you try
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