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The taxi pulled alongside an older man on his bicycle, and then suddenly veered right into his path. The bicyclist nonchalantly squeezed his brakes and veered out of the way, with millimeters to spare.

Beijing

John Locke
2006-03-29 10:25:54

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The taxi pulled alongside an older man on his bicycle, and then suddenly veered right into his path. The bicyclist nonchalantly squeezed his brakes and veered out of the way, with millimeters to spare.

"I'm not riding my bicycle here!" said Jill from the back seat of the taxi. This was only the fourth bicyclist to get nearly plastered to the side of the taxi.

The next day found us weaving through the Beijing bike lanes on our mountain bikes. Traffic lights are merely guidelines, unless there's a policeman directing traffic. To make a left turn, cars veer across the road wherever they fit, blocking oncoming traffic which must slam on their brakes. At each corner, bicycles and pedestrians accumulate until they have enough mass to make the drivers of the largest trucks give pause, and then all move into the intersection as if they were one of the taxis or other vehicles slipping through the chaos.

As a westerner, the trick was to let a Chinese rider run interference--use them as a buffer between the cars and us. With fingers on our brakes and eyes in our rear view mirrors, we were more than prepared for the experience, weaving, dodging, stopping, starting, and flowing with the hundreds of bicycles all around. "Okay," said Jill. "This is kind of fun, in a twisted way."

Riding a bicycle in Beijing is not for the fainthearted. But it's the best way to get around the pancake-flat city. A curbed row of trees separates the traffic lanes from the bicycle lane on most major thoroughfares. Bicycle doctors repair flats and busted chains at nearly every corner. At every building, rows of parked bicycles occupy empty parts of the sidewalk.

As much as I enjoy history and the stories of local people, I hate tours and tourist attractions. While in Beijing, we had to check out Tiananmen Square, of course. We walked through the courtyard in front of the Forbidden Palace, and along the moat outside--but we didn't ...

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