Whether they're seen as a pleasant breakfast option, a lifesaving bicycle repair station or a roadside obstruction, there are few people who really notice Beijing's street-side staple of sanlunche (tricycle). The peddlers of this city have become part of the furniture of Beijing.

That is unless you're one of the members of Beijing-based bicycle crusaders Smarter Than Car (STC), who have spent a considerable amount of their time following the patterns left in the asphalt by the tricycle users of the capital. This is part of an attempt to pick out the good, the bad and the ugly in a city which is dependent on pedal power for its livelihood.

Presenting their research at the Danish Embassy Thursday evening, STC members and founders Shannon Bufton, Florian Lorenz and Zhao Liman told a bike-friendly crowd about their research project called Bicycle Urbanism.

"We realized that bike activities like ride to work days weren't really for China. The culture here is not really centered on advocacy like it is in the West," Bufton said. 

However, the growing interest in China's capital as a center of bicycle culture has not dimmed abroad, and the everyday residents who use bicycles provided another angle for them to investigate, he explained.

"The average street in Beijing is quite rich in bicycle livelihoods; produce sellers, cleaners and repair stands. It gives a good idea of how a city can function powered by bicycles," said Bufton.

Over a week-long period the crew made a map of Dongcheng district, charting what different types of services were provided by bicycle, where they travel around and how they cluster together.

Apparently, if you see one sanlunche setting up business at a spot, there's bound to be more around the corner, and they seem to cluster at significant infrastructure points, like subways.

"It's very flexible the way that they move around and cater for different needs at different times of day and night," said Lorenz. "This spatial and also temporal flexibility is an excellent way of servicing the urban population."

Whether they'll be able to convince the greengrocers of London or bread sellers of Paris to get back on their bicycle after so much time remains to be seen, but the team is optimistic.

"We think that the experience of Beijing shows that cities should be again optimized for bicycles, that's what we call bicycle urbanism," said Lorenz. "We believe that in this time of economic crisis, people are turning back to the bicycle, if you look at examples like Greece."

Reuters reported at the beginning of August that car ownership in Greece had decreased 40 percent over the last two years, while bicycle sales had gone up by around a quarter.

STC has been presenting their research on Beijing's bicycle culture at various events around the world and getting a very warm welcome. It seems that the cyclists of Europe would be keen to see how much of their daily lives could be converted to two wheels.

Meanwhile, many of Beijing's cyclists are just wondering how they can get themselves a car. In 1986, says STC, Beijing was at its peak of bicycle urbanism, with some 63 percent of its citizens moving around by bike.

That has dropped significantly, but the project hopes that eventually Beijing will pass through the same cycles as the rest of the world, becoming too urban to be sustainable, then reverting back to good old-fashioned legwork to get people from point a to point b.

To learn more about the Bicycle Urbanism project, check out stcbj.com/en/research. STC also host bike rides and events to anyone who wishes to join.