How the smartphone brought young Chinese back to bicycles

Beijing: Within 30 minutes of a truck unloading 100 bicycles onto the footpath near Beijing's Guomao subway station at 7.30am, they are gone. Snapped up by young commuters who zero in on their target, eyes glued to smartphones. Unlock. Then they're off and pedalling.

Li Xiang, 28 says she can halve her
commuting time by using shared bikes.

As the weather warms this Beijing spring, swarms of pop-coloured bikes are reclaiming the city's cycle lanes, prompting cursing from taxi drivers. Stacks of parked yellow, orange and blue bikes spillover downtown footpaths - a long forgotten sight in the former "bicycle kingdom”.

Thirteen years after Beijing ended its bicycle tax and registration rules, heralded then as the arrival of the "car society", the bike is abruptly back.

Powering the new cycling boom are smartphone apps, and a generation of young Chinese who have become the world's most sophisticated users of digital payments.

Read Kirsty Needham’s story kin today’s Melbourne Age - “How the smartphone brought young Chinese back to bicycles.”

(The bicycle will play a key role in ridding the world of fossil fuels and the bicycle appears to be back in business in Beijing - Robert McLean)