China's bike culture forges way into deadly traffic
BEIJING — In Taiwan, insurance salesman Zhao Yukuan did his parents proud.
"They taught me to obey traffic rules. I never ran red lights," he says.
Then Zhao moved to China. In car-choked, smog-bound Beijing, vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians compete to break the rules.
"I always found I was the only one waiting for the green light," says Zhao, 33, who arrived in 2012 and soon joined the jaywalkers.
Wearing a sandwich board, a box-like head mask and big hand signs bearing the Chinese character for "stop," Zhao atoned for his sins Thursday. At a busy Beijing intersection, he joined a group of volunteers on the final day of their year-long, daily promotion: "I promise not to run a red light."
Changing bad behavior remains an uphill struggle even in a police state. "Chinese-style road crossing," or jaywalking, has been the subject of many reports in Chinese media, embarrassing officials here.
Beijing and other cities began fining jaywalkers a year ago. But on a recent day in Beijing, plenty of people were caught crossing streets without a walk sign due to low awareness of the risk and lax police enforcement.
The results can be deadly. Over 60,000 people die in road accidents each year in China, according to the police, but national disease surveillance system statistics put the real toll at more than four times higher. By comparison, there were almost 33,000 road traffic deaths in 2010 in the USA, according to the World Health Organization's 2013 road safety report.
Though China has more than four times the population of the United States, the two countries have similar numbers of registered vehicles — about 250 million. Child fatalities in traffic accidents are over 2½ times the rate in the United States, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences reported last year.
Chinese police claim some progress, such as fewer accidents with multiple victims. But "the traffic safety situation is far from optimistic, the burden of traffic accident prevention work is heavy, and the road ahead is long," admits Huang Ming, vice minister of public security.
Spotting dangerous driving in China isn't hard. It's not uncommon to see cars reversing on highways or speeding through crosswalks filled with pedestrians, some pushing infants in strollers.
Such behavior springs from an auto industry whose startling growth has outpaced legislation and administration, says Shi Jing, a road safety expert at Beijing's Tsinghua University.
China's car culture, on a significant scale, dates back only 10 years, he says, and its earlier bicycle decades weigh heavy.
"We all rode bikes in the past, and you could cycle as you pleased, there were no specific lanes," says Shi. "Today, people are not used to the car rules and still drive as they please, scrambling to get right of way."
As regular bike use fades, up to 200 million electric bikes now cruise China's roads. These e-bike users are former cyclists and wannabe car owners who take their bicycle culture and habits onto a more vehicle-like mode of transport, says Brent Powis, a road safety consultant for the World Health Organization.
Their ignorance of both traffic rules and e-bikes leads to "lots of risky behavior and a lack of risk awareness," he says.
Unlicensed and uninsured, speedy e-bikes are leading to a rising numbers of crashes, injuries and deaths, says He Jinglin, senior program officer on road safety projects for WHO in Beijing.
"Electric bikes are really the new road safety threat," she says. "We need to find ways to improve riders' knowledge, introduce licensing provisions for e-bikes and better enforcement by traffic police."
WHO research in Chinese cities showed that most bikes exceed national speed limits and few riders wear helmets, He said. WHO tries to change cultural attitudes by using social marketing approaches and social media platforms to reach the young drivers who most commonly display illegal behavior, Powis said.
Shocking videos of crashes that don't shrink from showing fatally injured people are common on Chinese television and websites as state-run media try to scare citizens into obeying the law.
And then there are the road volunteers.
Zhu Chaofeng, 26, a legal trainee and road safety volunteer, says his group's year-long efforts using banners to spread awareness have been supported and praised by the Beijing government.
"We chose to be silent because we don't have law enforcement power to stop the pedestrians, and we're afraid conflicts may occur," he said.
Zhu blames the long, 90-second wait between green lights for many infringements, and doubts even a tenfold increase from the current $1.50 fine would have much effect.
Meanwhile, child safety seats, most of which are made in China but exported, are finally achieving domestic attention if not sales, says Monica Cui, executive director of Safe Kids China, a non-profit.
Shanghai, which recently started requiring child restraints, "can be a model for China nationwide," says Cui.
But first car seat producers must convince Chinese grandparents that a child seat is safer than simply holding their grandchild. This intergenerational argument consumes many young Chinese couples, she says.
As for jaywalkers, Shi says China should cut them some slack and develop a better urban environment and traffic light system that enables pedestrians time to cross roads. In the most policed part of China, close to Tiananmen Square, several intersections this month introduced a metal barrier to stop cyclists and e-bike riders at red lights.
Traffic wardens grumbled at the tiring action of opening and closing the barrier and said some riders evade both the barrier and their protests.
"It's just a bad habit, not everyone is in a hurry," says Zhao from Taiwan, who hopes, with remarkable optimism, that China may resemble Taiwan in just two years.
He achieved at least one convert Thursday.
"I sometimes run red lights, when I'm running late," admitted accountant Wang Xiao, 25. "We can't solve this problem quickly. But I'll think twice next time, safety is more important."
Contributing: Sunny Yang