A rollercoaster ride in Asia

It’s the first thing veteran travellers say in Beijing or Bangkok, Hanoi or Mumbai: where have all the bikes gone?

As wealth and opportunity in Asia have grown, so has the use of first motorcycles and then cars.

The temperate cities of the Americas and Europe increasingly design their cities around the needs of two-wheeled, unmotorised commuters. In early-adopter Copenhagen, 36 per cent of commutes are by bicycle. But in ever-modernising Asia, where car ownership continues to rise, it might seem that the bicycle belongs to the era of black and white photos and big straw hats.

In fact, the picture is more complicated – and changing.

A 2015 Pew Research Center survey showed that bikes are still more common than cars globally. And two of the countries with the highest percentage of bike owners are Asian: Japan (78 per cent) and Thailand (74 per cent), behind only Germany.

World bicycle production fell drastically in the 1970s as car prices fell and incomes rose. According to the Earth Policy Institute the trend reversed in the early 1980s: global bike production climbed to 108 million by 1988. Between 1989 to 2001, production slowed down again.

Now the figures are again rising fast. Despite growing car ownership in China, 65 per cent of households have a bicycle. And now, you don’t even need to own one: the increasingly pollution-phobic country has the world’s greatest number of bike sharing schemes.

Taiwan – a global leader in bike manufacturing – has over 4,000 kilometres of bike lanes. Singapore has launched a National Cycling Plan. Only about one per cent of journeys are made by bike in the Lion City now – but with a 700-kilometre-long bike lane network planned, that will change. All they need are a few Danish-style cool breezes. By John Burbage