It's 7:30 on a chilly and misty morning. I sit on my Glisten (a 198-yuan/US$24 bicycle bought at a supermarket), with my right foot on the sidewalk, left foot on the pedal, and a cigarette in hand.

Xie Songxin finds cycling is the most efficient way to get around in Beijing. [China Daily]

I check the street. A few taxi cabs are waiting for passengers. A queue of people, mostly retired, is building up in front of a supermarket for discount goods. The traffic is picking up...

I look at the other side of the street to find my colleague and biking companion Wang Hui, who rides a 24-inch Forever bicycle. Her bike carries a basket on the front and a plastic chair on the back to carry her son to school. I had the same when my son was young.

After a simple greeting (sometimes just a word "go!"), we are lost in the stream of bicycles on our way to a school in downtown Xisi. It's the seventh week of our 107-day study programme. We have become diehard cyclists because of the benefits in time, cost and physical health.

We don't have much chance to talk to each other during the 45-minute ride, as we deal with the rush-hour traffic. There are at least 10 million bicycles in the city, 2.4 million of which are on the streets every day.

Private car ownership is rising fast at the cost of cyclists, who are left with less space and bigger risks on their way to work. For them, it's like a game of David vs Goliath.

There aren't many streets as good as the ring roads and Ping'an Dadao, where biking is smooth and the road is wide. On many occasions, you have to struggle forward in the middle of cars and buses. Sometimes, you have to push your left foot against the ground to move. Traffic rules have to be bent occasionally to save time.

However, looking at the stationary car traffic, we are lucky to be on our bikes. The same 12-kilometre trip from our homes in the northern part of town to Fengsheng Hutong on Dongsi Nandajie took me 90 minutes by bus. There is no definite time duration by taxi, from 50 minutes to 2 hours.

We are undoubtedly the fastest riders on Beijing's streets. The shortest ride took us 35 minutes. We haven't seen others riding as fast as us on the way.

I particularly like the ride back to the office before lunch time. The good conditions along Ping'an Dadao tempt me to "ride at a desperate speed" - I cycle until I can't breathe any faster.

Only the red lights make me slow down. If the traffic lights are green all the way, the ride between Ping'anli in the west and Jiaodaokou in the east can be done in eight minutes.

The smell of chestnuts roasted in sand with brown sugar from the street shops, and the scene of students leaving school on bicycles for lunch, augment my appetite for food, which is another reason for "desperate riding."

There are quite a few benefits I feel from biking: Good appetite, improved sleep, increased resistance to cold, better performance on the badminton court and more energy for work. I don't see why people spend so much money exercising on monotonous treadmills in gyms. The result - keeping fit - is more or less the same.

Going against the wind in Beijing's winter weather is really a challenge, as I discovered two weeks ago when I was riding up to the Anhua Bridge on the Third Ring Road against a strong wind. It cost twice my usual effort to get a third of my usual speed. To make things worse, a motor-powered pedicab, carrying waste food collected from restaurants, drove by and went ahead, leaving behind a suffocating rotten odour of fermentation.

My cycling experience strongly reminds me of the social responsibility to stop the rise in ownership of private cars in the city. Look at the worsening traffic jams and increasing pollution! Biking is so cheap and doesn't damage the environment. It doesn't need much space for parking - I always feel so angry whenever I find my parking place is taken by cars!

Beijing is no longer friendly to bicycles. Bicycle lanes have already been halved for motor vehicle traffic or parking, or for both purposes, leaving cyclists to struggle between cars, or forcing them onto the pavement. Last week, a bus drove past me on my left, with a space between us of only a few centimetres. I felt that I could have been killed within seconds.

Drivers are usually rude to bicycle riders. Some private car owners are snobbish, believing that cyclists have a lower income and lesser social status. You can see that from their impatient and insistent honking of their horns if you are in front of them, despite the fact that it's usually their fault because they've taken the bicycle lane.

A couple of weeks ago, a driver of a white Volkswagen Bora car behind me repeatedly hit his horn for a few minutes. It sounded like he was telling me: "Clear the way. I'm privileged!"

It seemed that he used the horn all the way after leaving the Jieshuitan Bridge on the Second Ring Road, as I found him honking away again when we met at a crossing in Ping'anli.

I feel so ashamed of the uncivilized drivers when I see them wind down the window and shout at a bicycle rider: "Zhao Si Na (To Hell)!"

Beijing's road conditions are far from desirable for cycling. Repeated construction on the same sections has left most of the streets full of bumps and hollows.

Pollution is another worry for cyclists. If you ride behind a slow-moving bus, you can see the heavy black smoke and smell its strong choking odour. If a passing bus hits you, you may be killed instantly. If you ride on your bicycle behind a bus, you may also die - in a matter of a few years.

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