Since I arrived in Beijing I've been marveling at the number of electric bicycles that zip around the streets carrying people inexpensively and quickly to work and on their business around town.
In fact, I've been so impressed I'm now seriously considering purchasing one for my own daily commute and have been moved to write an article promoting their potential merits to readers in Britain and Europe.
There is, however, one major drawback of these machines (aside from the fact that they run on not very environmentally friendly lead-acid batteries) which is that they are the silent assassins of the road: the whispering death of the pavements and bike lanes of Beijing.
I've lost count of the number of times I've come within a spoke's breadth of being sliced up by one of these machines as it glides silently by at up to 20km/h, which is fast enough to be - if not life-threatening - then at least extremely messy in a collision.
Perhaps I need to go back and bone up on my Green Cross Code - a British road safety campaign of the 1970s for Chinese readers - but I'm just can't get it pre-programmed into my dullard traffic-senses that bicycles can move that quickly and silently.
You don't even get the grunting and groaning of a peddle-cyclist, the tinkle of a bell or the rustle of moving body parts to alert you - just a whoosh of fetid Beijing air and you're sent diving for cover.
I thought I might be alone in pondering the dangers of electric-powered transport, until I read this article in the current edition of the Economist magazine.
It talks not about bikes, but about the menace posed by electric cars (if, and when, they ever become widespread) which will be zooming silently about mowing down the deaf, the blind and the stupid (like me) who don't hear them coming.
(As an aside, I've always wondered how people get run down by big, noisy things like buses, trains and lorries, but they do. So it seems logical that electric cars will be even more deadly).
Anyway according to that ever-level-headed publication, engineers are working on engine-noises that will blast out of speakers under the cars' bonnets which - while scotching the environmentalists dream of silent roads in 2020 - should preserve a few more pedestrians.
I can see a market here - just like personalised mobile phone ringtones today - for all manner of bespoke 'engine tones', downloadable off the web, for a fee of course.
Old farts can go for the fabled engine notes of their youth - say a Hely-Jensen 2000 or a vintage Aston Martin - while boy racers can opt for the screech and whine of Jenson Button's Brawn F1 car, or Lewis's Ferrari.
I feel a first million coming on, though no doubt someone's already thought of that too.
On that note, I bid you all a good weekend. I'm feeling slightly homesick (or at least India-sick) this weekend as its Lords Test Match and I shan't be able to watch it - for the first time ever.
I shall have to make do with taking the children out to the Fragrant Hills, or maybe the Beijing Botanical Gardens or the Summer Palace. It's a hard life.
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