By Lee Hyo-sik
Staff reporter
Riding a bicycle has become a popular weekend recreational activity among Koreans not only for its health-boosting effects, but also for fun.
Additionally, many salaried workers are cycling to commute to work on weekdays, helping to ease the traffic congestion and make the air cleaner.
However, this bicycle boom has its own side-effects. Thousands of bicycles have been left unattended on sidewalks across the country, posing an inconvenience to pedestrians, with thousands more being stolen or lost.
Against this backdrop, the government is moving to introduce a registration policy for bicycles, which is similar to that of automobiles, in a bid to more systematically manage bicycles across the nation.
The Ministry of Public Administration and Security said Thursday that it will implement a nationwide integrated registration and management system for bicycles next year to help owners more easily recover lost bicycles and prevent them from illegally disposing of bicycles in public places.
"The absence of a standard registration policy here has failed to encourage cyclists to register bicycles with the government. We will prepare a cyclist-friendly comprehensive registration program by the end of this year. We will then implement it in certain municipalities on a trial basis in the first half of 2011 and expand it to the rest of the country in the latter half," a ministry official said.
Currently, the Yangcheon District office in southwestern Seoul and four other municipal administrations are operating separate registration systems under which only 15,000 bicycles out of the estimated eight million nationwide are registered.
The ministry is considering either engraving serial numbers on each bicycle or attaching radio frequency identification (RFID) chips, adding that such information will be integrated into the automobile registration system run by the National Police Agency.
"If such a scheme is put in place, the police and other government offices can easily indentify either stolen or unattended bicycles and return them to their rightful owners. Additionally, the bicycle registration information could help the government make transport-related policies. We will eventually make the envisioned system mandatory for all bicycle riders," the ministry official said.
To make it easier for cyclists to register their bicycles, the government plans to allow bicycle shops to have them registered at the time of sale on the Internet. Insurance firms will also be encouraged to lower premiums for those who register their bikes.
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