FOR decades now, bicycles have been kings of the road in Shanghai, transporting young and old, lofty and lowly, through the city’s streets and markets.

However, times have changed and the automobile now rules supreme.

As for bikes, well, they just get in the way, according to local police.

Already barred from some major thoroughfares, bicycles will be banned altogether from important streets starting this year. To further discourage riders, police are jacking up fines tenfold for infractions such as running red lights.

“Bicycles put great pressure on the city’s troubled traffic situation,” one police official was quoted in the local press. Yet cars, buses and taxis put pressure on the environment, argue bike proponents, who aren’t taking the proposed changes sitting down. “Bicycles are an environmentally friendly means of transportation that should not be banned. Shanghai should instead take firm control of the increasing numbers of private cars.”

Vehicle emissions have become a major source of pollution in Shanghai and other big Chinese cities, even while heavily polluting industries have been shuttered.

Low polluting alternatives such as electric bicycles have grown more popular, but the new rules would ban those as well. Banning bicycles could also worsen overcrowding on buses and subways and prompt more people to turn to automobiles, worsening the pollution problem.

Shanghai, a city of about 20 million, has some nine million bikes. Numbers of new cycles in the city, ranging from the old-fashioned Flying Pigeons to the flashy new mountain bikes, grew by a million last year.

Bicycles are still the dominant form of transportation across China, where most people still make less than $1000 per year. With the Communist Party promoting bikes as cheap, egalitarian transport, working-day China ran almost exclusively by pedal power before increasing affluence and economic reforms fired a desire for private cars in recent years.

Shanghai boasted some of China’s earliest bicycle factories, and like other cities, set aside special bike lanes on main roads and built bicycle parking lots. Hordes of cyclists can still be seen in the old city centre, their tinkling bells penetrating the roar of traffic, riders’ multihued rain ponchos brightening the grey, drizzly winter days.

Yet cars and freeway development have been gradually encroaching as Shanghai takes its place as the Detroit of China’s burgeoning auto-industry.

In Beijing and other Chinese cities, bikes are also being shunted aside as car ownership grows. For now, anyway, there’s no talk of banning bikes in the capital, where bicycle access in the city is a symbol of the link between the communist government and its proletarian roots.

In Shanghai, the numbers of private vehicles nearly doubled to 142,801 at the end of 2002, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The figure was expected to top 200,000 by the end of 2003, according to Shanghai media reports.

And that accounts for only a small percentage of vehicles on the road: private automobiles are still outnumbered six to one by buses, taxis, government cars, and commercial vehicles.

City officials have tried to rein in numbers of new cars by raising registration fees and restricting access to the city centre.

Nevertheless, police officials seem intent on eliminating two wheelers as the key to reducing gridlock. Could be that in future years, the only bikes in the city are the stationary kind found in health clubs! — Samina Iqbal