Throwback: How a Dutchman Revamped Beijing's Biking Culture
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You may have heard of Beijing’s biking highway – the bicycle-only road that opened in 2019, running from the northern neighborhoods Huilongguan to Shangdi and soon to be expanded from 6.5 kilometers to 13 kilometers, reaching all the way to Xizhimen – but you may not know of its Dutch origins.
Five years ago this month, we reported on an effort to restore Beijing’s bicycle culture to its former glory. In our report, damning statistics revealed just how badly bicycle traffic share had declined – from a 68 percent share of all Beijing traffic in 1986, the mighty bicycle plummeted to just 14 percent of traffic in 2012. By 2015, it was less than 12 percent.
Drastic measures were needed to shift gears from a downhill tumble to an uphill climb. Fortunately, Dutch cycling traffic engineer Wim van der Wijk was ready to saddle up for the challenge. Having worked in Amsterdam, which at that time was the most bike-friendly city in the world, according to the Copenhagenize Index (the Danish capital for which the index is named has since reclaimed its rightful place on top), van der Wijk saw Beijing's untapped potential.
While the city had plenty of bike lanes, van der Wijk observed, they just weren’t being used as efficiently as they might be due to a rising car culture and a growing city sprawl that rendered many bike trips unfeasible. His plan was to secure funds from the Asian Development Bank to fundamentally overhaul Beijing’s transportation infrastructure, figuring that with the right investments, bicycle traffic share could be as high as 20 percent in 2020.Van der Wijk has also been active in efforts to improve biking accross Europe, including Warsaw
Typically, the rise of sharebikes is credited for this reversal, but we should not discount van der Wijk’s contribution. For one thing, his plan enabled the success of sharebikes by encouraging the city to improve its bike-friendliness – as the Beijing News report indicates, the city had repaired over 1,000 kilometers of bike road by 2017, blocked off larger vehicles from scores of lanes within the Third Ring Road, and serviced hundreds of overpass bridges. Moreover, his plan included funding better quality public transit, which encourages sharebike use according to the "last-mile" commuting principal, or the idea that bikes and public transit can be synergized to discourage commuting by car.
While biking highways can't be constructed in the city center, many lanes have erected barriers to prevent cars from entering bike lanes
The improvements continued, but before we get to that, let’s take another look at the Copenhagenize Index. Though over 100 cities are analyzed for this prestigious list of the world’s most bikeable cities, only the top 20 are published, which means we don’t know how well Beijing is ranked, only that it is worse than Hamburg, which has a score of just 52.7 percent. (Compare that to Copenhagen’s winning score of 90.2 percent.)
Hamburg has seen great success with its public sharebiking program
READ: Swinging on a Single-Speed: Beijing's Bike Polo Team Offers a New Way to Cycle
Images: China Daily, Lifegate, Beijing Daily, Travel to Hamburg
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