Beijing - 4th Ring Road / Jintung Expressway to Dongsishitiao Bridge

This is a ride in Beijing at rush hour on a Monday afternoon, temperature 35C.

I was in Beijing on a business trip and picked up a Dahon Prestolite folding bike at the NE store near the Exhibition Centre (see http://www.my-dahon.com). The staff there speak limited English, but enough to say the price of the bike. Bargaining is not possible on this type of item. I chose this model for a number of reasons:

1. light – made of 7005 aluminum, weighs 9 kg.
2. simple – only one speed
3. portable – 16” wheels, so it folds up very small
4. cheap – it cost 1466 RMB, or about $200.

The store did not have any Dahon Bolso carrying bags so I went to the Yachow clothing market in San Li Tun and bought a heavy duty nylon bag for 110 RMB or about $15 (bargained down from an asking price of 180 RMB).

Since it was a hot day, I rode slowly. But in Beijing, everyone rides slowly. Everyone seems to go at a relaxed pace, even the motorists.

The altitude graph is inaccurate, perhaps due to the placement of the GPS on top of my laptop case which hung under my arm. Beijing is quite flat and the mean elevation was about 35m. Also, the average speed is inaccurate; you can see that I didn’t start travelling for at least 15 min. after turning on the GPS, so my average speed over the 45 min. of actual traveling time was about 12 km/h.

The tracklog is not placed correctly on the Google Map. It doesn’t look like I followed any roads! If you switch to satellite view however, you’ll see that I followed Chaoyang Road for most of the E-W portion of my route, then turned north on Xin Dong Road and then west again on Dongsishitiao (after mistakenly traveling too farth north).

The clock time for my time is inaccurate as well. I forgot to change the time-zone on my GPS so the trip was recorded in MDT. I actually started the trip at 16:44, not 02:44.

Most of my route was on a special bikes-only side-lane so I didn’t have to deal with traffic. This type of street design makes cycling in Beijing feasible and relaxing even for we foreigners who aren’t used to a city of 14 million people. Here’s a video of riding on the bike lane on Xin Dong Road.