An ode to the humble but reliable tricycle

Ernest is an economist from the United States and resides in Beijing. He rides a golden trike and shoots fake money from a cannon at parties.

He says the decision to purchase the electric tricycle was largely, well, economic. But the glittery-gold spray paint — like the cannon that blasts fake notes — was an investment in fun.

Indeed, trikes’ prevalence and diversity strikes many new arrivals in China.

And a growing number of expats are getting three wheels of their own.

Beijing has long been hailed as the “Kingdom of Bicycles”.

I believe the country is underappreciated as an “Empire of Trikes”.

Bikes are relatively stan- dard everywhere.

But most Asian countries have their own adaptations of three-wheeled transport.

China has a taxonomy of tricycles — from small, foot-pedaled ones with flat beds to specialized species of gasoline-powered three-wheelers with rows of benches and coverings to protect riders and drivers from the elements.

Years ago, an artist rode through Beijing’s hutong (traditional alleys) on a trike re-engineered to dribble water to write calligraphy on the pavement as he pedaled along.

His statement was that both water writing — traditionally rendered on public spaces with massive brushes, like literati’s vanishing graffiti — and the trike were evaporating amid development.

Water writing seems scarcer than when I arrived 12 years ago.

Trikes? Not quite. That’s because they offer advantages bicycles and cars can’t simultaneously provide — a compromise between mobility in traffic congestion and versatility of function.

They offer less zoom than cars but more than bikes, and more room than bikes but less than cars.

Call it a Goldilocks vehicle. And a growing number of foreigners, who haven’t previously lived around trikes, appreciate their advantages so much that they’re buying their own.

A foreign couple in our apartment building used their trike, with two rows of benches, as the “family van”. That’s because they could fit mom, dad and both kids on the vehicle and zip around as they please. Before they left the country, they sold it to another foreign neighbor, who gave birth days ago.

My wife and I purchased a trike with similar intent, shortly after our daughter was born.

We got it mostly to transport donated clothes from a downtown drop-off station to our home many kilometers away, where we processed them for shipment to nomadic communities.

It was physically and financially draining to haul a few bulging bags at a time to the nearest place we could get a cab over several trips. Plastic bags often broke. When that happened, it was like carrying a large net’s worth of fish without the net.

The trike was meant to solve this problem.

We customized the vehicle to connect to two batteries so we could also ride all the way to the countryside and back with our daughter.

Alas, it was stolen within a week. So, we switched gears and bought an e-bike.

Yet we’re considering purchasing another tricycle, since we have another child, and Ernest has reminded us of how trikes can serve as the gold standard for practical transportation.