Cycling crusader hopes to get city moving on two wheels

“Yes, yes,” says cyclist Martin Turner. “Cycling is good for the environment, yes, it’s often a faster mode of transport, so you can say all of these things of course, but why do I cycle? Because it’s fun!”

Turner, 51, commutes to work from North Point to Wan Chai. For the first few months after he moved to Hong Kong from his native Britain, he gave up on the bike. He was enamoured by the metal shiny MTR, seduced by the Star Ferry and would regularly jump on a bus.

“But then I realised that actually buses move quite slowly, and they do this inconvenient thing where they stop to let people off, and then I’ll see something in a shop window that I want to look at but the bus isn’t stopping right at that moment.” So it was time to get a bike again.

Turner, as chairman of the Hong Kong Cycling Alliance, has been at the forefront of making Hong Kong more cycle-friendly. The Transport Department doesn’t even recognise cycling as a form of transport, he says, and he dreams of a time when Hong Kong will introduce the same bike-sharing systems now in place in any number of cities around the world.

Every year Turner organises a silent ride for those who have died on the roads that year. He says the yearly average in Hong Kong is 10, which is above the global average. Turner has been in court a couple of times for “careless driving”, even though he was struck by another car. Among fines he has had to pay was one for HK$1,000 for not having a bell on his bike.

There have been attempts to create cycle paths. But Turner doesn’t want them. He wants cyclists to have as much right to the roads as other modes of transport.