[M II A II R II K]

The De-Bikification of Beijing


April 9th, 2012

By Debra Bruno

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...-beijing/1681/

Just a few years ago, the streets of Beijing were clogged with so many bicycles that riders sailing through an intersection looked like a school of fish moving through the water. Today the cars have taken over. In fact, Beijing more and more is just another traffic-clogged city with Chinese characteristics. Its bike lanes are rapidly filling with parked cars, auto rickshaws spewing exhaust, and strolling pedestrians. To many Chinese, bikes are now for losers. The iconic Beijing bicycle is a sorry one-gear affair with a metal basket on the front which breaks so regularly that every street corner seems to have a makeshift fix-it stand. "There is a quote: ‘I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bike,'" says Jinhua Zhao, an urban planning professor at the University of British Columbia who's conducting a study of cycling in Beijing.

- The loss of a bike culture is a shame, says Shannon Bufton, the Australian-born founder of an NGO called Smarter Than Car. "It’s like Venice and gondolas. They go together, Beijing and the bike," he says. Bufton's solution? Transform the bicycle into a luxury item, like the Chanel bag, the Gucci shoes, and the Maserati car. That way, the Chinese would want to own and ride them to show they've reached the middle class. Bufton notes that when he first started Smarter Than Car in 2010, “I gave a lot of lectures about sustainable cities and about how positive the bike was for society,” he says. “And the Chinese people said to me, ‘Well, yeah, we know that, but we just started getting interested in the car. We want to drive cars."

- Smarter Than Car organized its first Beijing Bike Week in March, setting up a post in a luxury shopping mall surrounded by Ferrari, Aston Martin, and Maserati car dealers. The group showed movies about biking, ran a bike polo match, and organized a kind of scavenger hunt on bikes called an alleycat race. Bufton is even set to open a kind of café for cyclists, which he hopes will help foster a hip bike culture in the city. There is one demographic in Beijing that Bufton doesn’t have to work as hard to convince. More foreign residents, tired of the difficulty of finding a cab, fighting the crowds on the subway and buses, or figuring out how to pass the test for a Chinese driver’s license, are turning to bicycles. Expats, it turns out, love to wax rhapsodic about the romance of biking in Beijing.

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