01.25.10
Beijing picks a bad time to promote cycling
From PhilStar yesterday:
BEIJING (AP) — Authorities in Beijing unveiled a plan Sunday to make the Chinese capital more bicycle-friendly in the hopes of reducing the city’s choking pollution and alleviating congestion. . .
Beijing has 17 million people and four million cars, a figure that continues to grow and strain the city’s already overloaded road system.
Meanwhile, 19.7 percent of Beijing residents ride bicycles, and authorities hoped to raise that to 23 percent by 2015, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The city will restore bicycle lanes that were cut to make room for cars and buses, and build more bicycle parking lots, particularly next to bus and subway stations, the report said, citing Liu Xiaoming, director of the Municipal Communications Commission.
In addition to the moves aimed at encouraging bicycling, the government will also implement new restrictions on car drivers, Xinhua cited Liu as saying, without giving specifics.
This announcement is reminiscent of the government’s “plan” for the Beijing subway system, which started off well enough in the mid-20th century but languished for years in the 1980s and and 1990s, even as it became clear that roads alone wouldn’t be enough. It was not until Beijing was awarded the Olympics in 2001 that things really got going.
Aside from a well-developed subway system, bikes are the most obvious way to improve traffic in Beijing. Anyone who cycles in Beijing knows this: The landscape is flat, the roads are wide, and many bike lanes are protected from cars by curbs and rows of trees.
That’s why it is so frustrating to see cars taking over the city at the expense of bikers, pedestrians, and everyone else. I walk to the subway on the road because the sidewalks are filled with parked cars. I ride with my fingers not on the handlebar but hovering over the brakes, waiting for the drivers who play chicken and appear to move as if all the bikers and pedestrians simply weren’t there. I become the Weird Guy when I ride: When a driver behind me honks impatiently, I let him pass, but if he then gets in my way, I scream at the top of my lung for him to move. (After all, isn’t a car horn really just a substitute for a screaming voice?)
I remain skeptical that things will get better for those of use who ride bikes in Beijing, but I am happy to see this article. Only one complaint — why announce it on January 24, when we’re all freezing our asses off and few people are riding?
UPDATE 20100127: A recent “Spacing Toronto” post has some observations about the roads and traffic in Beijing and Shanghai:
In Shanghai and Beijing, it is the norm is to have sidewalks cordoned off from the roadway with barriers forcing pedestrian traffic towards overpasses. While pedestrian grade separation is most common at intersections, in Beijing it is also quite common mid-block. Beijing has adopted a car-dependent design of very wide avenues with multiple degrees of separation. Down the centre, several lanes of heavy traffic crawl through congestion while a low speed access road, parking and wide sidewalks occupy the storefront side of a barrier fence. Pedestrian flyovers here almost always have one steep staircase and one very gradual. The overpasses also often provide stairway connections to bus stops, a considerable investment in bus infrastructure.
What this setup gains in easy access for motorists it loses in attractiveness of the pedestrian environment as the pedestrian is distantly removed from the other side of the street. It also must cause obvious difficulties for the disabled. In many ways, it really seems that the human scale of the city has been lost, and it is not uncommon to hear Beijingers complain about the loss of the old city.
I too was a lot more concerned with “attractiveness of the pedestrian environment” my first couple of years in China. Having settled in a bit over the years, though, I find myself caring more that things just run reasonably well.
But for the most part it is a city of unapologetically wide avenues and broad, open thoroughfares, built on a grand scale rather than a human scale. At least Beijing has found some kind of solution to keep traffic somewhat moving without allowing highways near the city centre.
It sounds as though the writer has stayed on the ring roads and the newer sections of the city, where tens of tens of thousands of policemen, doormen, and security guards are required to keep the lanes open and the sidewalks clear of cars.
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