公路救赎: 拥堵让中国人重拾自行车

An hour after sunrise, the public bicycle stand on Kaixuan Road in Hangzhou starts to get busy. A mother loads her small son on to the bike’s child seat to deliver him to school. She swipes the public transport card that gives her an hour on the bike for free – the same rechargeable card she can later use for a ride on Hangzhou’s new subway line, a public bus or taxi.
早上7点左右，杭州凯旋路上的公共自行车租赁点就开始忙碌起来。一位妈妈把儿子抱上自行车的儿童座，骑着车送他去上学。刷一下公交卡，她就可以免费使用自行车一小时。之后，她还可用这张可重复充值的公交卡乘坐地铁（最近开通了新线路）、公交车或出租车。

Later, a middle school pupil wearing the red neckerchief of the Communist party’s Young Pioneers pulls out a bike, then an old man with a dog in the front basket, and finally 24-year-old white-collar worker Jin Qiyan takes the last cycle for his one-hour commute to work. Mr Jin owns a car, but says “it’s faster, more convenient and more environmentally friendly by bike”.
过了一会儿，一名佩戴红领巾的中学生推走了一辆车。接着，一位老人把一条狗放进自行车前车篮里，推着车离开了租车点。最后又来了个年轻人——24岁的白领金奇彦（音译）推走了该租赁点的最后一辆自行车。他需要骑一个小时才能到工作的地方。金奇彦有一辆私家车，但他说，“骑车更快、更方便，也更环保”。

With a rental stand every 300m in downtown areas, mobile apps that tell users where to find the closest available bicycle, and fees that rise from Rmb1 to Rmb3 an hour, the scheme is already very popular: as many as 400,000 people use it every day.
在杭州市中心的街道旁，每隔300米就有一个租车点，有许多移动设备应用程序告诉用户最近的租车点在哪里，一小时免费期之外的租车费用从每小时1元到每小时3元不等（按超出时长分为三个费用等级）。目前这个项目已经广受欢迎：有40万人每天都使用租赁自行车服务。

Hangzhou wants to encourage the city’s 1m car owners (a figure that has quintupled in the past decade) to stop “misusing” their vehicles for short trips that could be made by bike, says Luo Bin of the Hangzhou Municipal Comprehensive Traffic Research Centre, a quasi governmental organisation. The city government wants 50 to 60 per cent of people walking, riding electric bikes or push bikes.
杭州市综合交通研究中心(Hangzhou Municipal Comprehensive Traffic Research Centre)是一家政府下属机构。该中心的罗斌表示，杭州希望鼓励该市100万名私家车车主（这个数字是10年前的5倍），在骑行距离内的短途出行中不再“滥用”汽车。杭州市政府希望，步行、骑电动车或自行车出行者的比例能达到50%至60%。

Other cities such as Suzhou, Foshan, Shenzhen, Taiyuan, Changsha, Shanghai and Chengdu, to name just a few, are also pushing public bicycle rental.
其他许多城市也在大力推广公共自行车租赁，随便说几个，比如苏州、佛山、深圳、太原、长沙和成都，等等。

But so far there are few signs that the Chinese are ready to trade in their BMWs and go back to bicycles: in the first quarter of this year, sales of SUVs rose 45 per cent year on year – hardly a sign of an environmental revolution among Chinese drivers.
但迄今仍没有多少迹象表明，中国人准备卖掉自己的宝马(BMW)，重新选择骑车出行。今年一季度，运动型多功能汽车(SUV)的销量同比增长45%，这很难算是中国私家车主开始环保革命的信号。

Mr Luo acknowledges that a big part of the current problem is failure to enforce laws against traffic violations such as double parking and blocking intersections. “Fifty per cent of the congestion is made by people themselves,” says Klaus Paur, of Ipsos consultancy in Shanghai. Handing out a few traffic tickets may be easier than getting China’s car lovers to obey the decree: let them ride bikes.
罗斌承认，当前的问题在很大程度上缘于，并排停车和堵塞路口等交通违章行为未受到严肃处理。益普索(Ipsos)驻上海分析师包亦农(Klaus Paur)表示：“拥堵有50%是人为造成的。”让中国的爱车人吃几张罚单，比让他们响应“骑车出行”的倡议更容易。