Resisting Car Culture In China
More Chinese are abandoning their bicycles -- not because they now own cars but because the dramatic increase in automobile use is making city streets too dangerous for cycling. But cyclists are fighting back.
"In the 1970s, private cars were almost non-existent in China, but over the past decade vehicle ownership has skyrocketed. Last year, the country became the world's second-biggest car market, behind the United States. Sales of new vehicles in China (including cars, trucks and buses) soared 25 per cent last year to reach 7.2 million. The total number of motor vehicles in China is projected to reach 130 million within the next 15 years. In Beijing alone, there are 1,000 new cars on the streets every day.
As a result, bicycles are increasingly being squeezed to the margins. The streets are choked with traffic and automobile fumes. New roads are sometimes built without any bike lanes. Hundreds of bicyclists are killed in collisions with cars every year.
Pedal power has become so life-threatening that many Chinese have abandoned their bicycles.
All of this is provoking a backlash across China. A movement is emerging to promote the rights of bicyclists. Environmentalists are calling for bike lanes to be restored and expanded. Newspapers are crusading on behalf of bicyclists, investigating the scandal of roads without bike lanes."
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Resisting Car Culture In China
Unfortunately, this story, like many others lately decrying the incursions of the automobile into Chinese culture, misses the point. It's the abundant advertising of cars that is the problem. Ban car ads and the problem would all but disappear: the evidence is in the way the ban on cigarette ads in the U.S. led to smoker's current pariah status. Advertising works to subvert the evidence that is before people's eyes: its power is exactly in its apparent weakness. It's ironic that this "kung-fu" method should work so effectively in China, of all places, but it does. People can see the absurdity of automobile culture: they get it that driving a car is a trap, a spiral of consumer waste. Never underestimate the power of advertising to convince them otherwise though.
When the story was published in Toronto the other day, I reacted to it with a letter to the editor (unpublished):
Geoffrey York writes: "When a female bicyclist was photographed in a confrontation with a motorist who had intruded into a bike lane in Beijing, she became an instant celebrity. The media hailed her as a hero, and the motorist was forced to apologize." All this is true, but York fails to mention the "instant celebrity" was a white woman. The source is here: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20061027_1.htm.
The story is complicated by the fact that the lane in question was said by police to be a "shared lane," in the Beijing style: a collector lane off one of the city's wide boulevards, open to both motorized and human-powered vehicles.
Having recently returned from a Beijing visit, I saw first-hand the dangerous mix of cars, bikes and motorbikes in these collector-lanes. Cars often push into these lanes to make an end-run around the clogged central lanes of the boulevards.
It is likely that most of the car owners and taxi drivers who are clogging the streets of Beijing today are relative new-comers to automobile ownership; what is remarkable is that despite this fact they have no empathy or respect for the cyclists and pedestrians with whom they share the streets.
Is there a lesson here for Canadian cities? Or is it the other way around? While in China now anyone who has the money travels by car or taxi, leaving only the poor to get around by human power, in Canada a significant percentage of urban cyclists are middle-class, well-educated tax-payers who've chosen to ride a bike.
In Toronto, councillors made a move to encourage more motorbike use by eliminating their on-street parking fees. It's quite common now to see motorbikes parked on sidewalks and even tethered to the city's bicycle ringposts.
How long until these well-meaning but deluded councillors move to permit motorbikes the use of dedicated bicycle lanes?
Urban cyclists and pedestrians worldwide need to work together to fight the further erosion of our safe places. We need to work to expand the non-motorized areas of cities. It is significant--and deeply saddening--that China is moving in the other direction.
The ALLDERBLOB because it's past time to ban automobile advertising