Wheels of progress

From then to now: a bicycle rush hour in 1991 Shanghai and a Beijing traffic jam today.

The photo of urban bicyclists was taken at the railway intersection of Guangxin Road, a short street to the west of the Shanghai Railway Station near the city's old industrial area.

The stream of bicycles crawling across the railroad tracks was so slow that cyclists had difficulty keeping their balance - many have one foot on the road, while others simply push their bicycles.

Our photographer was unable to get a photo for a contrast of what it looks like today. He couldn't find his way back to where the picture was taken - massive development has changed Shanghai so much it would be unrecognizable to a 1991 resident. The area is somewhere under today's Inner Ring Elevated Beltway built in 1996.

But getting a photo of what vehicle traffic is like in China's cities today is all too easy. Just a short walk from the China Daily office is Beijing's Fourth Ring Road, where in the early evening of every weekday, traffic crawls as slowly as the bicycles on Shanghai's Guangxin Road almost two decades ago.

Many urban dwellers, including the laowais (foreigners) who have been in China long enough, miss their trusty old bicycles and what once came with them - a softened sense of time, the feeling of a breeze in your face and the rewards of physical exercise.

But today's cities have sprawled so rapidly they can no longer be easily and routinely covered with a bicycle. Scenes are no longer seen of bicycles pouring out like water from the floodgates of a factory at quitting time.

Cars were added as a household durable item on the National Statistics Bureau's reporting sheet in the late 1990s, joining refrigerators, video cameras, personal computers and other pieces of machinery. In developed coastal cities, private car ownership is surging.

Figures on bicycle ownership are gradually losing their statistical importance, used less and less as a consumer index. Cars are now more often used as a measure of the economy's overall opportunities.

It is a trend that alarms environmentalists and those critical of American-style development. Nostalgic or ecologically aware, many lament that China is abandoning its bicycle tradition.

Little can be done, it appears, to slow the change - just as stopping people from shifting their interest to "green" cars would be.

(China Daily 03/03/2008 page1)