The bicycle's past glory is just like the disappearing "rings" from bicycles on the roads.

He, 56 years old, is one of the witnesses. He has been running a bicycle maintenance stand near the gates of a residential community for at least 10 years. He said in the past two or three years, there have been more and more cars running on this road, two car maintenance shops opened side by side around the community last year, and another car maintenance shop appeared this year across the street from the previous two shops. The three car body and maintenance shops on both sides of the road are so close together, but their business have all been very good. In contrast, the business of his bicycle maintenance stand has become more and more difficult, with increasingly less business although no competitors have set up business nearby.

The facts indeed, are like what He has suggested. Following the economic development, the gradually expanding urban size, growing improvements to public transportation and increased privately-owned cars, the "two-wheel world" has become more and more inferior to the "four-wheel world" in the competition for seizing territory on the roads. Various thresholds set for the purchase of cars all have been lowered. Furthermore, the expanded areas of cities has caused a good number of working-class households to live far away from urban districts, so that riding a bicycle to commute to the office wastes both time and energy. Motor vehicles acting as an alternative transportation method as well as a new consumption item have begun entering into more and more common households.

Last year, a traffic expert once set forth a viewpoint, believing that too many bicycles are an important reason behind traffic congestion, which triggered extensive controversies. Even though this viewpoint was revised later, it should be an objective reality that the mutual interference between the bicycle flow and the vehicle flow in China's major cities has reduced the traffic efficiency on roads.

Meanwhile, the calls for the return of the bicycle are also soaring, especially amid the pressures of both environmental protection and high oil prices. The current bicycles are not merely a type of transportation tools, they are increasingly being used for fitness and leisure.

30 million bicycles are purchased annually by 1.3 billion Chinese people, marking that the development of bicycles has not yet come to an end.

By People's Daily Online/Zhejiang Daily