This is the third essay on the book Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider by Wang Wan. The section of Wang Wan’s book that left me breathless is titled Riding Against Traffic (逆行). It is not only about breaking traffic rules. It is about how she slowly learned to rationalize risk under pressure.
Wang mastered the mechanics of survival: how to grab orders efficiently, how to calculate time, how to account for traffic lights, elevators, and stairs. Every detail served one purpose — beating the clock. 5 minutes late meant losing 30% of the delivery fee; 10 minutes meant losing half. “Only after delivering food,” she writes, “did I truly understand that time is money.”
Veteran riders told her that years ago delivery windows were generous. The system was not punishing. Now, they blame the “hyper-competitive grinders.” If one rider finishes a one-hour order in 40 minutes, the system recalibrates. If another does it in 30 minutes, the bar rises again. Improvement does not bring relief — it tightens the standard. The competition feeds the algorithm, and the algorithm feeds the competition. As Wang puts it, they are trapped in endless internal competition.
To save time, riding against traffic becomes routine. Around Hopson One Mall and nearby university areas, following traffic rules can mean detouring several extra kilometers or waiting through long signals. During rush hour, more riders travel the wrong way than the right one. Under shrinking deadlines, caution becomes costly. What begins as a violation gradually becomes normal.
The city’s infrastructure deepens the risk. Narrow overpass ramps and poorly designed underpasses push riders toward shortcuts. Once, trying to save distance on a 20-kilometer order, Wang lost control on a slick ramp and tumbled down the stairs. Injured but worried about compensation, she checked the food before checking herself. She bit off sauce-stained petals from a 400-yuan bouquet and completed the delivery. The customer never complained. She still felt ashamed.
“There isn’t a single delivery rider who has never ridden against traffic,” she writes. The system gives tight deadlines. Riders have only two choices: ride faster and break rules, or accept fewer orders and earn less. There is no third option.
What suffocates me is not only riding against traffic or the risk, but the inhumanness of the algorithm itself. Wang Wan left her village seeking opportunity, like millions of migrants before her. Yet in the city, her labor is governed by a system that constantly self-recalibrates against her own effort. The harder riders push, the tighter the standards become.
This is not merely her story. It reveals a defining feature of modern platform labor: improvement does not bring security; it only raises the bar. When survival depends on speed, legality and safety become negotiable. Within this system, dignity must be defended against a mechanism that consumes time, body, and margin.
2/13/2026