As someone who cycles to work over some of Beijing's most congested and polluted roads several times a week, I sometimes wonder: "Does it have to be like this?"

Aren't there places within the vast metropolis where one could escape from killer car drivers unwilling to concede an inch of precious road space or slow down? 

Such thoughts come naturally. Sunny days evoke dreams of being young and peddling all day without a care in the world along bucolic country lanes where the only sounds come from twittering birds and buzzing insects.

That paradise actually existed not that very long ago in many parts of Beijing, before urban sprawl took over.

In western Beijing, now dominated by the Fourth and Fifth Ring roads, there used to be miles of narrow, unspoiled country lanes with hardly a soul in sight. I know - hard to imagine, right? Yet this was in the mid-1990s!

So, I'm trying to recreate this idyll in 2013 by looking for places easily reachable from the city center for leisure cycling.

The Internet offers plenty of cycle tours for the foreign visitor, such as www.beijingbike.com. You can rent a bike to join a guided group roaming the few remaining parts of old Beijing around the Second Ring Road, where some of the traditional hutong (small alleyways) are preserved.

Well, I've got my own bike and I've done all those touristy things. They're quite nice, but you still have to risk life and limb on the main streets to get to the quieter bits around, say, the Lama Temple, and that takes some of the pleasure away.

I did find a group of cycling fanatics known as the Beijing MOBsters who head for the hills on weekends. But their website suggested they were all wannabee mountainside race contestants, and that's beyond my powers now.

Some of my university students recently cycled to the Great Wall, which sounded challenging. But that's a long haul and I still don't see how you can get there without contesting road space with giant tourist buses and other motoring menaces. And it seems to have been an eight or nine-hour round trip that sounds rather exhausting.

Actually, where I live does offer some possibilities around the Fragrant Hills and Western Hills as far as Badachu. But the constant urge for road improvement is steadily eroding the bicycle-friendly stretches of roads.

More promising is the Laoshan Mountain Bike Course in Shijingshan District near the Fifth Ring Road used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The 4.6 km Olympic course is real dirt riding. 

The problem is getting there. It's on the subway network but how often have you seen someone with a bicycle on a subway train? In Britain, railways offer cyclists special deals for them and their machines to reach specially developed rural cycle trails.

As the capital continues expanding, that's what we need here.