"It's not safe for our son!", says my wife, effectively quashing all my arguments in favour of riding our bikes and her e-bike, without helmets on. Surrounded by a thousand electric scooters in the e-bike section of the Auchan retail store in Suzhou, China I stand nonplussed, as my wife expounds at length on her stand that helmets are a necessity. In China as in many developed countries in Europe, there are dedicated bike lanes on roads as part of a very successful government drive to get people to ride bicycles or electric scooters - e-bikes in the local parlance. Very unlike their European counterparts on the other hand, Chinese bikers are a stoical bunch, who use helmets only as winter-wear and think nothing of sharing their lanes with cars looking for parking spots, other bikers zooming in opposite directions and pedestrians. Such skills are rarely in-born though and my wife had had close shaves enough, in the first two days of her e-biking adventure, to feel the...
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