New bicycle!

After last week's post on 2 wheeled freight I got inspired and decided that it was time for a new bicycle. As you know many of the bicycles these days come from China. In my case I went for a "Merida", which is produced in the "renegade" province of Taiwan. I also got a distance and speed meter and I now know that the distance of the walk that I make from time to time is 4.9 kilometer.

The general impression is that the number of people cycling in China is going down because people prefer to go by motor bike or by car. In the case of Shanghai it "real" motorcycles are not allowed and you see that many people as an alternative use electric motorbikes. This can be quite advanced types which look and perform like the real thing or they can be "souped-up" bicycles like we had in Holland about 20 years ago and which were aimed at old people like me :-) who liked to cycle but who did not like the effort. L. tried to convince me for a moment to go for an electric one but I decided that I still like and need the exercise.

China produced last year about 16 million electric bikes. This is twice as many as the number of cars produced. They set up this entire industry in about 10 years. This is one of the reasons why I think that we should take China serious when they talk about setting up an electric car industry.

In the last years many of the cities have sacrificed bicycle paths in the city to make space for the cars. This was also the case in Shanghai. We were quite pleasantly surprised to see that they started to construct a bicycle path outside our apartment. In this case it was at the expense of the pedestrians, but as you can see there is still quite an acceptable sidewalk left.