Bike own­er­ship in China is on the decline while car own­er­ship con­tin­ues to rise. How will China shift gears and move back to pedal power?

Address­ing the secure bike park­ing short­age is just one of the ways local gov­ern­ments plan to make bike trans­port­a­tion more attract­ive to res­id­ents | Photo by Jess Scully

Accord­ing to People and Planet, “From 1995 to 2005, China’s bike fleet declined by 35 per­cent, from 670 mil­lion to 435 mil­lion, while private car own­er­ship more than doubled, from 4.2 mil­lion to 8.9 million.”

The increas­ing num­ber of cars on China’s roads – Beijing alone is cur­rently home to some 4 mil­lion cars — has meant that many of bike lanes stretch­ing through the cap­it­als have been sac­ri­ficed to make space for cars.

Respond­ing to this trend, local gov­ern­ments will begin imple­ment­ing new meas­ures aimed at encour­aging com­muters to recon­sider pedal power. Accord­ing to China.org, “The city [Beijing] will restore bicycle lanes which were cut to make more room for cars and buses. It will also work to relieve a short­age of secure bicycle park­ing”. They will also make moves to rework and remove cur­rent reg­u­la­tions deter­ring bike usage.

Shang­hai city author­it­ies have also announced plans to develop city­wide bike lanes.

While not exclus­ively linked to — but cer­tainly impacted by — the increased num­ber of cars on the roads, some read­ings, includ­ing those taken from the US embassy’s air pol­lu­tion mon­itor sta­tion in down­town Beijing, show that air qual­ity con­tin­ues to deteriorate.

It is hoped that China will even­tu­ally return to being the ‘king­dom of bicycles’, as it was called in days where more than 500 mil­lion bicycles were used as a primary form of trans­port­a­tion, and recog­nise that some­times pro­gress means mov­ing back to sim­pler methods.

Do you use a bike as your primary means of trans­port­a­tion, or to access pub­lic trans­port in your city? Tell us about some of the bene­fits — and chal­lenges — of using pedal power in your city. What do city plan­ners, gov­ern­ments, busi­nesses and res­id­ents need to do to encour­age a return to a bike-powered cul­ture?