自行车回归,能否拯救北京交通

Living in Beijing in the early 2000s, I had one laborious chore every morning before I could ride my bike to school: pulling it out from my neighbors’ bicycles, which were stacked together like turkey meat in a sandwich and stretched out into an endless line. It was a time when 40% of people in China, known as the “kingdom of bicycles, ” cycled to work and school.

本世纪初那几年住在北京时，我每天早上骑车上学前都要干一件体力活：把我的自行车从附近左邻右里的一堆车子中生拉硬拽出来，这些车子堆放在一起像极了三明治里的土耳其烤肉，而且绵延无边的阵仗又一眼望不到头。那时四成的中国居民都骑车上班和上学，中国又称“自行车王国”。

Now, as Beijing’s 19 million residents and 5.3 million cars turn highways into parking lots and subways into sardine tins, the municipal government is urgently calling for a comeback of the old-school bicycle. In June of last year, 2, 000 public bikes appeared in two downtown districts in Beijing. With a refundable security deposit, Beijing citizens may rent the bikes free of charge for the first hour and for 1 RMB, or 16 U.S. cents, an hour afterward. A year later, the government has added another 12, 000 bicycles in five outer-suburb districts. The goal is to quadruple that figure in the next two years, raising the usage rate of bicycles in the city to above 20%.

现在，随着北京的1,900万居民和530万辆汽车将高速路变成停车场，将地铁变成沙丁鱼罐头，北京市政府紧急呼吁老派的自行车回归。去年6月，2,000辆公共自行车出现在北京的两个商业区里。交上一笔可退还的押金后，北京市民就可以租借这些自行车了，第一个小时免费，之后每小时收费1元（约合16美分）。一年后，北京市政府在五环外的郊区又增加投放了1.2万辆自行车。目标是在接下来两年里令这一数字增长三倍，将北京的自行车使用率提高到20%以上。

The cycling scheme is intended to fill gaps in Beijing’s public transit network, reduce congestion, and improve air quality. But to any Beijinger who once saw the upgrade from bikes to cars as an iconic step-up into the middle-class ranks, this program is an ironic reminder of the country’s blind pursuit of GDP growth. It is an example of the government’s lack of foresight in dealing with the side effects of economic policies: When tax reductions and cash subsidies were issued in 2009 to stimulate automobile consumption, the government probably didn’t expect citizens to hoard 1.6 million new cars in just two years and completely clog Beijing’s roads. New regulations had to be adopted to limit the number of cars. And now, the city government is betting on the public bicycles, an increasingly popular choice of transportation in cosmopolitan cities such as Paris and New York, and in domestic cities such as Hangzhou, where 70, 000 bikes are rented 260, 000 times daily.

这个骑车方案意在弥补北京公共交通网络的空白，减少拥堵，并改善空气质量。但是对任何曾把汽车代步视为迈入中产阶级标志的北京人来说，这一项目颇具讽刺性地让人想起了中国对GDP增长的盲目追求。这是政府在应对经济政策的副作用时缺乏前瞻性的一个例子：2009年当颁布刺激汽车消费的减税和现金补贴政策时，政府可能没有料到市民们会在仅仅两年的时间里囤积了160万辆新汽车，而且完全阻塞了北京的大街小巷。后来又不得不采取新规，对汽车数量加以限制。而如今，北京市政府正把希望押在了公共自行车身上。在像巴黎和纽约等国际性大都市里，自行车成为了日渐受欢迎的出行选择，而且在像杭州这样的国内城市里，7万辆自行车的每日租借次数有26万之多。

But will public bicycles provide the much needed antidote for Beijing’s traffic woes? The program’s performance has not been very impressive so far. According to the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transportation, 170, 000 rentals were recorded in the past year, meaning the average rental frequency is less than once a day for each bike. Comparatively, rental frequency in Hangzhou was more than three times a day a year into the program.

但是公共自行车能否为北京的交通顽疾送上一剂急需的良药？到目前为止，该项目还没有非常令人印象深刻的表现。根据北京市交通委员会的数据，去年公共自行车租借了17万次，这意味着平均每辆自行车的租借频率不到一天一次。相比之下，杭州该项目运营一年下来，每辆自行车的租借频率超过每日三次。

One key problem that bicycles cannot solve in Beijing is transportation to downtown from the outer suburbs. The national census shows that by 2010, 40% of Beijing’s population lived in the city’s 10 suburban districts, which are simply too far away from the city center to make bike-riding feasible. For instance, Tongzhou District in the southeast corner, connected to downtown by one of Beijing’s most jammed highways, is at least 50 minutes away by bike. As more white-collar workers move to the suburbs for their lower housing prices, transportation to downtown will become only a bigger challenge.

在北京，自行车关键不能解决从远郊到市中心的交通问题。全国人口普查显示，到2010年时，40%的北京人口居住在北京的十个郊区，这些地方离市中心太远，使得骑车并不可行。例如，北京东南角的通州（这里连接市中心的道路是北京最拥堵的路段之一）到市中心骑车至少需要五十分钟。随着越来越多的公司白领受到房价较低的吸引而搬到了郊区，到市中心的交通问题将只会成为一个更大的挑战。

What’s more, Beijing’s rapidly deteriorating environment is not welcoming to outdoor activities. On a good day, the city’s particulate concentration level is equal to the worst of New York City, where the new network of Citi Bikes now stretches over lower- to mid-Manhattan and part of Brooklyn; on a bad day, three times New York’s. The Beijing government faces a paradox: The cycling program partially serves the purpose of reducing pollution, but its popularity may be largely dependent on the city’s current air quality.

更何况，北京迅速恶化的环境也不适宜户外活动。好天气里，北京空气中的微粒浓度相当于纽约的最差水平——在纽约，新的花旗自行车（Citi Bikes）网络现在延伸到了曼哈顿中下城以及布鲁克林的部分地区；坏天气里，北京的微粒浓度是纽约的三倍。北京市政府面临着一个悖论：推行骑车项目部分是为了降低污染，但它的受欢迎度可能在很大程度上取决于北京当前的空气质量。