The past ages of man have all been carefully labeled by anthropologists (人类学家). Descriptions like “Paleolithic (旧石器时代) Man”, “Neolithic (新石器时代) Man”, etc., neatly sum up whole periods. When the time comes for anthropologists to turn their attention to the twenty-first century, they will surely choose the label “Legless Man”. Histories of the time will go something like this: “In the twenty-first century, people forgot how to use their legs. Men and women moved about in cars, buses and trains from a very early age. There were lifts in all large buildings to prevent people from walking. And the surprising thing is that they didn’t use their legs even when they went on holiday. They built cable railways, ski-lifts and roads to the top of every huge mountain. All the beauty spots on earth were mined by the presence of large car parks.”

The future history books might also record that we lost the right of using our eyes. In our hurry to get from one place to another, we failed to see anything on the way. Air travel gives you a bird’s-eye view of the world or even less if the wing of the aircraft happens to get in your way. When you travel by car or train, the unclear picture of the countryside constantly slides over the window. When you mention the most impressive place-names in the world, the typical 21st century traveler always says “I’ve been there.” - meaning “I drove through it at 100 miles an hour on the way to somewhere else.”

When you travel at high speeds, the present means nothing: you live mainly in the future because you spend most of your time looking forward to arriving at some other place. But actual arrival, when it is achieved, is meaningless. You want to move on again. By traveling like this, you skip all experience. The traveler on foot, on the other hand, lives in the present. For him traveling and arriving are one and the same thing: he arrives somewhere with every step he makes. He experiences the present moment with his eyes, his ears and the whole of his body. At the end of his journey he feels a delicious physical tiredness. Satisfying sleep will be his: the just reward of all true travelers.

Right in front of the Minneapolis Central Library, a row of green bikes sits parked in a special stand. Each bike is designed with the logo “ Nice Ride”-- the name of the city’s bike-share program.

Nice Ride bikes are a lot like the library books that people come here to borrow. To rent a bike, you simply use your membership card at a Nice Ride bike station. Members can rent one of l, 200 bikes from 138 stations throughout Minnesota’s largest city. People use the Nice Ride bikes to go to work, to go out on business , or just to enjoy the city’s many bike paths.

The rise of bike-share programs like Nice Ride is encouraging more people than ever to choose biking over driving. Skyrocketing gas prices and concerns about the environment have also gotten people to dust off their bike helmets, pump air into flat tires, and hit the road.

Why ride? Not only is biking good exercise but switching from a car to a bike also cuts down the  amount  of pollution  in  the  air. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse  gas linked to climate change, is one of the many polluting substances that come out of a car’s tail pipe.

Bike-share systems are found around the world in cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne, Australia. The largest program with 70,000 bikes--is in Wuhan, China.

To make roads friendlier to non-motorists, the U. S. Department of Transportation has invested more than a billion dollars in cycling and pedestrian projects in recent years. The money went toward building thousands of miles of on-street bike lanes and pedestrian-only passages called greenways.

The Hangzhou-Changsha section of the Shanghai-Kunming(Hu-Kun) high speed rail(高铁) officially started operation on Dec 10, 2014. The Changsha-Huaihua(Chang-Huai) section of the Hu-Kun high speed rail was also opened to traffic a week later.

“It is no longer a dream" for Changsha residents to "leave for a trip without hesitation", said Changsha Evening, as it is really convenient either to go eastward or westward from Changsha.

During the trial operation of the Chang-Huai section on Dec 9, the G6521 train left Changsha South Railway Station at 8:40 am, arrived at Xiangtan North Station at 8:54 am, Loudi South Station at 9:22 am, and Huaihua South Station at 10:28 am.

Before the opening of the high speed rail. Changsha had 13 regular trains to Huaihua, the fastest of which, the Z149, leaves Changsha at about 6:00 am and arrives at Huaihua at nearly 12:00 am, being more than four hours slower than the high speed train.

The total length of the high speed rail in Hunan province is now more than 1,000 km, covering 10 out of the total 14 prefecture level(地区级的) cities or autonomous districts-much higher than the national average level.