August 20, 2010

Beijing returns to biking

From the Guardian:

After wrestling for years with Beijing’s appalling traffic and pollution problems, city planners have come up with an old-fashioned solution: bicycles. Municipal officials want to boost the number of cyclists by 25% during the next five-year plan, state media reported.

Twenty years ago, four out of five residents in the Chinese capital pedalled to work through one of the world’s best systems of bicycle lanes. But the modern passion for cars has made two-wheeled transport so treacherous, dirty and unfashionable that barely a fifth of the population dares to use lanes that are now routinely blocked by parked cars and invaded by vehicles trying to escape from jams on the roads. …

The Xinhua news agency said the Government hoped to improve the infrastructure for cyclists, including restored bicycle lanes and new rental programs providing 50,000 bikes for hire by 2015. The authorities plan more bike parks near bus and train stations so that half the city’s residents will travel to work by public transport in five years.

Residents welcomed any improvement on the current system, which is so bad that some businessmen keep a fold-up bike in the boot of their chauffeur-driven cars so they can escape bad snarl-ups.

Ref: Jonathan Watts, (Guardian), SMH, 27/1/10

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