A recent AP story discussed the pressure that increased industrialization and wealth have put on those who still use the bicycle in China.
As the Chinese fall in love with cars, and Westerners fall out of love with them, China is once again a winner. According to the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based environmental think tank, of the 130 million bikes manufactured worldwide last year, China made 90 million, and exported two-thirds of them. About nine of 10 bikes bought by Americans are made in China.
Multiplying cars may be a sign of affluence, but the bike's staying power is a reminder that most of China's 1.3 billion people have yet to make it into the middle class.
Tan and sturdy, the 30-year-old hauls flowers and garden supplies from an outdoor market to upscale Shanghai homes on a three-wheeled bicycle cart called a "sanlunche" (pronounced san-loon-chuh) [WC: Sanlunche = awesome pet name!]
For the Beijing Olympics, the city is offering visitors 50,000 bicycles for rent [WC: at 100 locations], but many bike pathways in Beijing and Shanghai have been taken over by right-turn and bus-only lanes. Big offices and hotel buildings generally provide bicycle parking onsite only for employees.
Shanghai's 10 million bikes are banned from many main streets. A trip from Hongqiao, in the western suburbs, to the busy Nanjing Road shopping district is an obstacle course around no-go zones and subway construction projects. The riverside bike paths so familiar in Western cities are nonexistent.
It's odd that the Chinese are not more bike-friendly, considering both their history...
According to Amir Moghaddass Esfehani, a historian at the Technical Institute of Berlin, the Chinese first learned of bicycles from a customs official named Binchun who visited Paris in 1866 and wrote of Parisians riding vehicles made of "two wheels with a pipe in the middle."
Back then, well-heeled Chinese generally got around in rickshaws or sedan chairs, both hauled by manpower. It was only after expatriate Americans and Europeans began cycling around Chinese cities that the fashion took off, Mr. Moghaddass writes in "The Bicycle and the Chinese People."
Through the three decades of communist central planning, bicycles were encouraged as transportation; buses were crammed and infrequent, taxis virtually unheard of.
And their future...
In addition to reducing traffic, the plan is designed to improve the notoriously poor air quality in the city of 17 million, which Chinese government and Olympic officials have long feared could interfere with the summer games.
The International Olympic Committee said in March it could be forced to postpone endurance events, such as the marathon or the triathlon, if pollution is too heavy.
News reports say Beijing has spent as much as $17 billion in environmental cleanup efforts before the Olympics, and the Chinese government claims air-quality improvements that have dramatically increased the number of "blue sky" days.
Image courtesy of Xinhuanet
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