Xiamen’s Bicycle Skyway has inspired Beijing and Bangkok to create similar highways

Designed by the Danish architecture firm Dissing + Weitling, the Xiamen Bicycle Skyway opened in 2017 and is the biggest of its kind in the world, allowing cyclists to soar over car traffic and remain largely protected from rain by the bus transit line above it.

Nearly 8km-long, the elevated bicycle road, or “skyway”, is a landmark pouring the most ice onto the Xiamen cool pile.

The Xiamen Bicycle Skyway is part and parcel of the Chinese government’s big push to be the world leader in reducing pollution, and, of course, there are few things cooler than helping the environment.

To make my journey on the skyway as hipster as possible, I rent one of the retro-cool orange and silver Mobike shared bikes that litter the city.

I start pedaling from Hongwen, the southern tip of the route. The green-painted skyway is mainly flat, meaning that even with the Mobike’s mildly laborious pedal pressure levels it’s a breeze, aside from one final uphill stretch.

On this final wheeze-push before touching down at Xianhou, the other end of the track, I get overtaken by a pensioner riding a battered Flying Pigeon bike. Despite this slight embarrassment, riding the corner loops and swoops of the track is a wonderful way of seeing this fast-changing city.

Xiamen’s Bicycle Skyway also inspired Beijing two years later to build a 6.5km-long bicycle highway, although it is not entirely elevated. It opened in May 2019.

In Bangkok, the Smart City Innovative Research Academy has also proposed “The Skycycle Project”, a 21-km long elevated bicycle route that will run parallel with the Thai capital’s Airport Rail Link. It starts from Phaya Thai BTS station and ends in Lat Krabang, Bangkok Post reports.

Read: Xiamen is China’s new capital of cool – these are the people making it that way