I bike daily. Even in Honolulu, a city of a million, I have near misses several times a day. I can only imagine what it is like to bicycle in China. When I was there, seeing hordes of bicyclists riding through Beijing was one of the most inspiring sites of my life. The only thing that can come close was the Critical Tits ride at Burning Man last year. Get a bike. Ditch the SUV. Amazingly, it is almost always a Lincoln Navigator, Hummer, or other small penis compensator that nearly kills me. The following is a great article…I just picked one small highlight…take ten minutes and read it, then go for a bike ride. Just watch for the SUV’s .
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Shanghai by Bike – September/October 2006 – Sierra Magazine – Sierra Club
In 2005, China became the world’s second-largest car market, selling nearly 6 million vehicles. Suddenly it was littering its western high deserts with oil pumps and sucking oceans of crude out of Sudan. Meanwhile, Shanghai was cracking down on cyclists, barring them from select vehicle-heavy downtown streets and increasing by tenfold the fines it imposed on two-wheeled lawbreakers. Ridership was way down. While 60 percent of Shanghai’s population commuted by bike in 1995, only 27 percent did so in 2000–and the city’s power brokers seemed happy about the decline. As one former deputy mayor saw it, “The bicycle is just a reminder of past poverty.”