Helen Deng
THE city government is planning to build bicycle lanes after years of giving away bicycle lanes and footpaths to automobile lanes.
Bicycle lanes would be built in the Huangmugang-Baishaling area in Futian District this year, the government told a press conference at the Citizens’ Center yesterday.
The city will also begin to plan bicycle lanes around Metro stations and on the eastern coast this year, the press conference was told.
At a legislative meeting yesterday, legislator Liu Luyu criticized the government for turning bicycle lanes into automobile lanes.
“The government spent a lot of money building roads every year. But at the same time, bicycle lanes — at least all the bicycle lanes in the special economic zone — have been canceled,” said Liu, director of the Enterprise and Market Research Center of China Development Institute, a leading city think tank.
Liu suggested the city rebuild all bicycle lanes.
Building bicycle lanes was good for the city economy and Shenzhen was one of Asia’s biggest production bases for top-grade bicycles, he said.
A spokesman for the urban planning bureau acknowledged that many bicycle lanes had become car lanes.
“The city government attached great importance to bicycle lanes in the early days. But with the number of cars increasing quickly, many bicycle lanes were turned into car lanes or pavements. This is not convenient for bicycle riders,” said the spokesman.
The spokesman promised to improve facilities for bicycle riders by building more lanes and parking racks for bicycles.
In another development, Vice Mayor Zhang Siping ruled out charging higher registration fees for car plates or adopting an odd-even license plate system. Some legislators had raised the proposals to limit the number of cars on Shenzhen roads as the registered number of cars was 1.28 million at the end of last year.
Zhang also said the city government would research congestion fees, but said that it was unlikely to charge congestion fees this year because of the Metro construction work.
