Continental shift to the car

Cycling and Asia seemed inseparable. Now a rush to motorisation has serious safety implications

Cycling and Asia seemed inseparable. Now a rush to motorisation has serious safety implications. Mark Godfrey reports from Beijing

It's no longer safe to be a cyclist in the major cities in Asia. Certainly not in Beijing. Break-neck economic growth has created the wealth to allow more and more Chinese to buy cars, but a chronically overloaded infrastructure is unable to keep pace with the hungry rise in car ownership.

Bicycles, the traditional transport in Chinese cities, are being pushed off the road as cars eat up bicycle lanes.

Of the 1.2 million people killed in traffic accidents worldwide each year, most are pedestrians or cyclists or motorbike riders in developing Asian countries such as China, Vietnam and India, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

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China has topped world rankings in road accidents since 1988, when the annual death toll exceeded 50,000 for the first time. The country's road fatalities total has exceeded 100,000 each year since 1999.

More than 1,000 traffic accidents are reported in Beijing every day according to the Beijing Transport Management Bureau, 80 per cent caused by barely-qualified drivers who have picked up licences after a few weeks training.

The city faces a calamity if it doesn't act quickly: Beijing's registered population is projected to grow to 17 million by 2010, and the number of private cars will increase from today's two million to 3.8 million.

By the end of 2003 more than 96 million vehicles were plying China's roads. Of that figure 24 million were private cars. Awareness of traffic safety and driving regulations - to the extent to which they exist - are both erratic, judging from a glance at rush-hour traffic in Beijing and other cities.

Motorways resemble jigsaw puzzles, with overtaking drivers weaving in and out between buses, motorbikes and vans. Jack-knifing, wreckless u-turns and light-jumping are everywhere to be seen.

Beijing authorities have taken measures to reduce the numbers dying on the roads, but enforcement remains a constant problem. The city has banned the tiny vanettes popular with traders and entrepreneurs from coming inside the city's third ring road - the vehicles were seen as dangerous, and prone to toppling over.

Last December municipal officials also banned overloaded trucks from the city's highways. Overloaded lorries carrying coal, vegetables and construction materials to the city have caused many of the city's traffic accidents. Upturned sand trucks and coal lorries are not an uncommon sight, sprawled accross expressways circling Beijing.

Poor quality vehicles are also a major cause of accidents in Beijing: jammed locally-made minibuses are often seen halted on highways, engines burning.

The problems are potentially worse in China's sprawling rural hinterlands, where roads are poorer but traffic is, up to now, lighter.

Migrant labourers coming to the city for construction jobs have been blamed with causing many accidents in cities. Driving trucks and vans, rural labourers often have no experience of highway driving and most don't carry licences.

In February 19 people were killed when a truck overturned on a mountain road in northwest China's Shaanxi province. The open-top truck had been carrying farmers to work in a nearby city.

As China's cities expand and residents are moved to suburban high rises, commuting by bicycle is no longer such an easy option. There are 142 bicycles for every 100 families in China today, compared with 182 per 100 families in 1998, according to the China Bicycle Association. Only a decade ago, over 60 per cent of Beijingers relied on bicycles.

Now car ownership has become a status symbol and the average driver in Beijing racks up 47,400 kilometres a year - three times the figure for US drivers.

"Many car drivers like to show off," says Zhang Guowu, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University. "Some people joke that even going to the toilet calls for a car."

Zhang believes there must be less use of private cars. He wants the city government to raise parking fees and to raise awareness of road safety.

As for public transport, the city's systems, particularly buses, are chronically overloaded. With a population of more than 16 million, Beijing is served by only 54 kilometres of underground lines, taking only 5 per cent of the weight of total traffic flow. Tokyo, with a similar population, has 2,000 kilometres of urban rail handling 80 per cent of traffic flow. The figure is 70 per cent for Paris, while Moscow manages 55 per cent.

Shaken by such comparison perhaps, Beijing's mayor Wang Qishan last month promised that satellite cities would be created to cut traffic into the capital and that public transport would account for 60 per cent of the city's total traffic flow by 2010, up from the current 26 per cent.

India seems to be having more luck with its safety record. Better policing and modern technology have been credited by Delhi's police for a fall in fatal accidents in the Indian capital.

Road deaths dropped by up to 8 per cent in the past two years, according to a Delhi police spokesperson. Special campaigns against speeding, bad parking, excessive beeping and drunk driving have been partnered with more stringent prosecutions in India.

Technology helps too. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is spending $12 million this year in a pilot project to improve road safety structures and monitoring along a section of the Delhi-Mumbai (Bombay) highway.

China's government, according to an ADB official in Beijing, will have to introduce new technology and traffic management systems if fewer people are to die on its roads. More traffic police need to be trained.

So far most of Beijing's traffic management is handled by poorly-paid civilians placed at busy junctions. These flag-waving officers concentrate on keeping jaywalkers off the streets and cyclists in-lane. Cars, for now, rule these dangerous roads.