China: Keep Them Pigeons Rolling!
by Alex Pasternack, New York, NY 
on 06.20.06
For all the huffing and puffing we do about China’s environmental woes, it's worth remembering that old-fashioned conservation, efficiency and reuse have been staples of Chinese living before green was anything but a lovely color. Perhaps there is no more elegant and high tech emblem of that lifestyle than the bicycle. In the late 80s, China’s bike population pushed 500 million, and today you can hardly get around a Chinese city without an old Flying Pigeon or a sleek new Dahon folding bike.
And yet, one need only take a look at the air, or at Beijing’s incredible traffic jams, or the record-breaking automobile accidents across China, to see that the country is slowly losing its title as the Bicycle Kingdom. Indeed, the Chinese government estimates that the number of cars on China's roads in 2004 was 20 times that of 1978; presently, Beijing adds 1000 new cars to its streets every day. As incomes have risen in recent years, driving the demand for cars, governments in cities like Shanghai even began banning electric scooters from roads and closing bike lanes to make room for big new buildings and highways.
That’s why it was so refreshing to hear last week that the government has ordered that all sacrificed bike lanes be restored.
As the Guardian writes,
Qiu Baoxing, a vice minister with the Ministry of Construction said it was important that China retain its title "kingdom of bicycles," according to a report by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Given the country’s rapidly growing economy, the number of cars in China is expected to increase as much as five fold by 2020, Qiu said. And, as Lester Brown reminds us, if China continues on its course toward United States income levels (and like the U.S. today, can boast three cars for every four people), there will be 1.1 billion vehicles on Chinese roads, compared to the current world fleet of 800 million.
Until china’s cities adapt more green principles of design—and automakers start seeing China as a place to cheaply build and market hybrid cars—the bicycle will continue to be China’s leading symbol of green cool. And hopefully it will even serve--gasp!--as a model for other countries as their urban development keeps rolling along.
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Can we get our country to do that? I'd LOVE it. :)
My only despondent thought is that the hazardous air conditions may make biking difficult, even with bike lanes.
Having a communist government allows for these broad-ranging mandates on conservation practices. Imagine if the same directive were issued by the U.S. EPA.
KPod -
If you read Jared Diamond's Collapse, he makes the same exact point about several societies (both ones that failed and ones that survived). With the near total control that the government in China has, they can massively influence both internal policies and world affairs ... imagine what the population increase would have been if China had not imposed limits on the number of children per family?
If you are looking for a book that talks about ways in which a society can succeed (or fail) at the environmental wheel, read Jared Diamond!
Cheers!
Wow - I am honored that I think like Jared Diamond. He's one of my heroes. But I haven't gotten to Collapse yet - I'll put it on my wish list.
Glad to see that the bike lanes will be making a comeback! However, I've been looking at some projected auto sales figures in China and I'm not encouraged by the numbers. According to one estimate, there will be 150 million cars on the road in the at the end of the next decade. I sure hope most of them will be hybrids!
On my recent trips to China, some of the more metro cities have banned bicycles on the roads, prehaps as an attempt to control the crazy traffic chaos on the roads. Or maybe it's to keep the metro cities looking metro.
But likewise, glad to read about the revital of dedicated bike lanes. I am still waiting for mayors or local government officials to draw up dedicated bike lanes. If NYC can limit the number of automobiles in the city and promote bike riding, I think other metro cities will follow suit.
Interesting that so many hardcore environmentalists would appear to happily tolerate living under a repressive communist police state -- just as long as it came with bicycle lanes.
Please kill me now.
By the way, major cities (and even smaller ones) in China have had horrendous pollution for many decades before cars ever became a factor. This was also true for former eastern European Warsaw Pact countries. Ask yourself: why it is that in industrialised Western democracies, where the rate of automobile ownership has always been much higher, the air is also cleaner by several orders of magnitude?
You think a centrally-planned economy, run by a despotic totalitarian regime is the solution to your nominal crisis? Think again.
--
editor note: Please drop the strawmen, nobody here said that totalitarian regimes were good. But have you ever considered that the air is relatively clean in many western countries because they outsource most of their dirty manufacturing (and so they outsource their pollution) to poorer countries that have low environmental standards (and these things are seen as positives by big corporations)?
this is good.