A Beijing cyclist gestures at a car illegally using the designated bike lane. Photo: Weibo

New | Photos of ‘brave’ Beijing expat standing up to car in bike lane go viral

Published: 6:00pm, 17 Nov 2014

Photos of a foreign cyclist blocking a car attempting to use a Beijing bike lane have gone viral in the Chinese cyberspace with many praising the expat for daring to confront a common problem.

The images were originally uploaded to Weibo on Saturday afternoon, and have since been shared more than 42,000 times on the social network. In the pictures, a man on a bicycle is seen standing with his arms crossed and gesticulating at a black car parked in the bike lane of a road in Beijing, apparently after the driver attempted to use the bike lane as a shortcut.

“Today on Yaojiayuan Road I saw this scene: a foreigner insisted on stopping cars in the bike lane from passing! Resolute attitude, I am very touched!” the Weibo user wrote.

Weibo commenters were equally impressed.

“I hope more Chinese learn from this brave expat to stand out and say no to bad habits,” said one commenter.

However, another pointed out that “if it were not a laowai, I bet he/she who stands in front of the car would be beaten up.”

With more than five million cars on the road according to the city’s traffic police bureau, Beijing is plagued by gridlock. Earlier this year, the Beijing-Tibet expressway saw a 55-kilometre long traffic jam as residents flocked to leave the city for the May Day holiday.

“Cars are all over the bike lanes in Beijing,” Shannon Bufton, co-founder of Smarter Than Car, which promotes cycling in China’s capital, told the . “Beijing is a city that is overrun by cars.”

While Bufton sympathised with the annoyance of the “pretty horrible” behaviour of drivers in the city, he points out that “at least there’s bike lanes in the first place.”

David Oliver, another expat who cycles regularly, puts the problem down to a general lack of driving standards.

“There are a lot of very selfish drivers in China,” he told the .

Oliver said he was amazed at how patient local cyclists are when cars block the bike lanes, “in the West it wouldn’t be that way.”

Beijing’s government has long promoted cycling as a solution to its traffic problems, in 2010 it announced that by next year it was expected that nearly a quarter of the city’s residents would use cycling as their primary form of transportation.

At present however, Beijingers, whether cyclist or driver, struggle to deal with the city’s ever-present congestion. A 2011 survey by the International Business Machines Corp found that in terms of emotional and economic toll of commuting, Beijing was second only to Mexico City when it came to commuter misery.

“The brave foreigner deserves our respect [for standing up to the bike lane driver], but the traffic on the road is to blame for the driver’s violation,” one Weibo commenter wrote.

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