Transportation

-A bicycle parking lot at the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China.-

While in Beijing there were two things that I noticed.

One, air quality was so horrendous that looking down a city street you could see about half a block before the smog started to choke out the view. Even on a cloudless day, skies in China's capital are not distinguishable as blue. And, at night, Chinese only imagine what stars look like.

And two, on a more positive note, of all the roads and of all the places we visited in Beijing, we noticed that bikes had their own lanes. Now it might be a little late to start enforcing or encouraging bicycles in order to clean up the air for the Olympics but it is definitely not too late to start cleaning up the air for good.

So after all of this rambling my question is, are we simply standing around and judging China or are we making ourselves open to learning from China's mistakes and triumphs?