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Constant danger plagues those who seek to walk
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AFTER enjoying a complete and full English breakfast cooked by my mom, I laced up my sneakers, put on my sunglasses, shouldered my backpack and walked downstairs to kick off my ride to the office.
“A whole new day,” I told myself. Despite the exploding sun and heat wave, I’ve been addicted to a bike ride between my home and office twice a day.
I started daily riding very recently after a bus I used to take almost everyday changed its route in connection with urban construction. With the bus route not rescheduled by now, I’ve decided to embrace a more efficient and eco-friendly commuter vehicle instead of the overcrowded carriages and traffic jams during rush hours and long waits at bus stops that I’m fed up with.
It used to take me almost 45 minutes for a nearly 4-kilometer bus ride in the morning, but the time spent on the same distance has been shortened to 15 minutes since I started the bike ride. The situation has been obviously improved, which enables me a full breakfast at home or another half-hour of sweet sleep.
At the same time, there are challenges, some of which are even life-threatening.
Since my first-day ride, I’ve found many bicycle lanes constantly occupied as unlicensed parking lots. I had to borrow the drive lane to the left many times during my ride — an extremely risky maneuver. Cars roar past me at a high speed with only a few inches to spare.
I usually ride along Shaanxi Road from south to north, while the driving lane for the busy one-way street is the opposite direction. To make things worse, the section between Nanchang Rd. and Huaihai Rd. is under construction for a future Metro station, which means a bottleneck is always there on my way to the office.
Yesterday morning, a head-on collision almost took place between me and a black luxury car as I was riding in the narrow bicycle lane along South Shaanxi. Fortunately, I was able to drive my bike cross the sidewalk to avoid a crash.
Too many cars
During the rest of my journey on the street, I had to ride in the oncoming traffic lane as three container trucks were parked along the bicycle lane while several other cars were waiting in line to enter a gas station on my right side.
There are too many cars but too little space in our city. Road congestion has become one of the only things certain in locals’ lives, like death and taxes.
By the end of last year, Shanghai had more than 2.6 million automobiles. Most of them ride on narrow downtown streets.
That’s why many of us have to spend more than an hour in cars to travel only several kilometers.
That’s also one of the major causes of the city’s intensified air pollution. And that’s why more and more people in the city resort to two-wheel traffic or would rather just walk.
However, city authorities haven’t created an environment which is friendly to two-wheel riders or pedestrians to ease the traffic and our fragile ecology.
Once I walked to a bookstore not far away but my journey was full of obstacles. The sidewalk was occupied by street furniture, temporary stands, locked bicycles and scooters. I had to walk into the street full of roaring cars and skirt parked vehicles. When I attempted to cross the intersection, I desperately dodged cars turning left from the opposite lanes as well as cars turning right from behind. When I arrived at the store, I congratulated myself on my narrow escape.
More buses
Since then, I’ve firmly supported any policy to curb the increasing number of cars and to improve public transport. Perhaps our traffic regulators could leave more road space for buses and mete out severe punishments for any vehicle parked in bicycle lanes.
Why not build up more ferry bus lines linking major residential areas to nearby commercial hubs where both Metro and transit services are available?
Perhaps our traffic rules could be more pedestrian-oriented so that we could smoothly get to public facilities in the vicinity to save more energy, cut emissions and do more physical exercise.
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