There aren’t many New York transport issues on which the China correspondent can lend a hand, but my colleague John Cassidy has found one. In his lightning-rod of a post questioning whether the city needs so many bike lanes, he mentioned that, at times, City Hall looks to him, “intent on turning New York into Amsterdam, or perhaps Beijing.” (His accusers thus added red-baiting to the indictment.) Now that his piece has been elevated into a Rorschach test on class, cars, and democracy, I’ll offer a perspective from a place that has wrestled once or twice with issues of class, cars, and democracy.

First, a taxonomy. Beijing has at least three definable species of bike lane. The most luxurious, which we’ll call Business Class, is a ribbon of designated asphalt set off from the car world by a sidewalk and often a tree or two:

The second variety, Economy Class, shares the roadway with cars and buses, but takes up the prized area beside the curb, monopolizing the space for parking that has John concerned.

The third species, which we’ll call Economy Plus, has elements of both: a line of parked cars, a lane for bikes, and at least two lanes for autos. Pros and cons: Everybody gets their lane, but that has required widening some of Beijing’s roads to at least seven lanes, and very often twice that, producing not so much roads as “exalting deserts of tarmac,” as a visiting urban planner once put it. Along the way, the buildings on either side get leveled (with or without a fight) and neighborhoods are altered. None of this is the fault of the bike lanes—the roads are being widened, without question, for cars—but none of the options are without tradeoffs.

Before cyclists start boarding flights for Beijing like the fellow travellers of yore, know that bicycle production has been falling since 1995 here, and the lanes have been gobbled up by cars ever since. The country has been rapidly losing its attachment to the human-powered two-wheeler that it first glimpsed in the late nineteenth century and regarded as a “foreign horse” or a “little mule that you drive by the ears.” One of the replacements, I’m pleased to say, is the electric bike, which I’ve been driving by the ears for eighteen months and counting. Not surprisingly, I’m an ardent fan of the bike lanes and would seriously rethink my own e-bike evangelism if they disappeared. For a comparison of the situation on both sides of the Pacific, I turned to Ed Wong of the Times. He pedals all over this town, and did so as well in New York a decade ago, before bike lanes had taken off. His take: