Quote Originally Posted by chinabiker View Post
The problem is that many BJ bicycle lanes are car-parking lanes also and therefore it's difficult to ban cars from those lanes.
BJ has a big parking space problem for cars!
When I arrived in China in 1990, there were so few private cars in Beijing it was as if you knew who half of them belonged to. ("Oh! There's Hou Dejian's purple Benz!") Today, Bejing's roadbuilders will never keep pace with the spiraling number of cars (2,200 new cars a day hitting the streets, as Laojiahuo noted), so they encroach and encroach and encroach. City planners indeed now calculate parking for cars into the bicycle lanes, meaning in a "bicycle lane" that's, what, maybe 10m wide, the assumption is that 3m of that is for parked cars, and another 3m for cars entering and exiting parking places, leaving little additional space for actual bicyclists. But This is China. Give someone an inch, and they'll take a mile. So now in Beijing we see cars parking on both sides of the bicycle lane, meaning there is only a narrow 3m chute through which bicycles and cars accessing the parking, and of course other cars that are just trying to escape the jam in the traffic lanes, and it quickly becomes snarled and useless for everything. Bicyclists have no choice but to go onto the sidewalk, or, in my case, out into the traffic lanes.

Compared to 20 years ago, the situation is dire and really undermining what little charm Beijing retains. Sad.