To hike or bike? Getting around the capital with ease

Most healthy Beijingers have a predetermined tolerance for just how far they're willing to walk to go grocery shopping, give gadgetry and gizmo gurus a gander at fix-em shops, or maybe take Gonzo the goldendoodle for her monthly grooming. What I typically hear is that a 2-kilometer upper threshold for round-trip walking distances is tolerable. Asking around, that means a 20-30 minute back and forth sojourn for most, tops. This stretch of pavement and temporal investment seems to be a "rule of thumb".

Whoops! That expression's etymology conjures up Sleeping With the Enemy-like domestic turmoil. I'll try again. Given the capital's scorching summer swelter, hiking such distances surely results in the dreaded "ring around the collar" for even the most endothermic of pedestrians.

By the way, this unfortunate summertime sweat stain shame was behind perhaps one of the all-time most cringeworthy ads of the 80s in which a group of Children of the Corn crossbreed with Children of the Damned preteen urchin types to chant the cruel incantation "Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar!" with arms linked circling a poor housewife's clothesline to attract attention to her allegedly slovenly housework and laundry acumen in general. I digress (by now most readers would have completed their 30-minute round-trip trek to the laundromat), but that childish insult in a Whisk spray-away stain commercial is based on the adorable nursery rhyme: "Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down!" Ahhh … yes … what Larks! Singing that with my elementary school peers, and then the collective joy of falling down as a group after the refrain on the soft grass without fear of breaking a hip. Who can deny the sweet innocence and joy of youth?

Whoops! On closer inspection, "Ring around the rosie" refers to the itchy rash around the infected sore of a person plagued with the plague …

OK, let's get back to some smooth-talking street jive. The Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport said in late 2019 — just before the pandemic — that the total length of its roads citywide surged by over 130-fold over the previous seven decades thanks to massive construction of transportation infrastructure. As a stranger to matters of civil engineering, that seems like a remarkable achievement, on par with the construction of the oldest and longest man-made canal in the world, with a history of over 2,500 years — the 1,800-km Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal.

So just before the pandemic, the capital's road network stretched some 29,400 km and its road density increased to 179.3 km per square kilometer.

The number of regular bus routes in the metropolis also skyrocketed from only five in 1949 to more than 1,200 half a decade ago, with a combined operating distance of over 22,000 km.

Therefore, if the weather is too tepid to trot or Gonzo is too wheezy to walk, the city has many other options for those less fleet of foot, such as sidewalks full of shared bikes, countless bus routes, a sprawling subway system and taxis just an arm's wave or finger's tap away. The paramount challenge remains getting Gonzo up to speed on how to keep her lower paws on the shared bike pedals.