Have you seen the stories? This or that major city is setting up bicycle stations, where citizens can pick up and drop off basic bicycles for a small fee. Paris has done it. Barcelona has a great plan going. Other cities, too.

The idea is to get people out of cars, perhaps get them some exercise.Hong Kong Island is polluted, and compact, and the people here don’t seem to get much exercise. So wouldn’t this be a great place for some cycling around town?

Well, no.

Well, definitely not.

Well, absolutely don’t even think about it … not.

For several reasons.

Cycling in Hong Kong would be a death wish on two wheels.

In some previous posts I have tried to convey how dense this city is, at least the strip on the northern half of this island. It is one of the most densely inhabited places on the planet. In the top 2-3. And if you worked the numbers for the few square miles on the north side of the island … it would have to “boast” the highest population density on the planet. Have to. Because no city, not New York, not Shanghai, not Macao, has more skyscrapers in a tighter area.

Anyway, at first thought, cycling would work here. The area we’re talking about is only a few miles wide, and most of it is barely above sea level, so it’s not as if there would be all these hills to negotiate if you live, say, in Sheung Wan (in the west) and were to pedal to North Point (in the west). It would be about six miles, on almost entirely even ground.

But distance and terrain mean nothing in this consideration, because of this:

There is nowhere to ride a bike.

No space. On the roads. On the sidewalks.

Something I haven’t really made clear is how tight most of Hong Kong Island’s streets are.

Envision this, if you can (and I’ll see if I can find a photo that illustrates it):

You have just walked out of the front door of a store on, oh, 90 percent of the streets in this city.

Ahead of you, is perhaps six feet of sidewalk. Often less. Rarely more. Six feet from front door to road.

And on that road, which may have been laid out 100 years ago, when traffic was still moving mostly by horses and people, and is amazingly narrow … are a nose-to-tail parade of buses, minibuses, cabs, delivery trucks and private cars.

Those vehicles often speed past at such rates … that you can feel your clothes being sucked along by the vacuum the vehicle that just passed has created.

The vehicles are so close to the narrow sidewalks, in fact, that for many stretches, the pedestrians are separated (and perhaps vaguely protected) from speeding vehicles by steel fencing that stands about three feet high.

So, you are on the sidewalk, the fence is one foot from you and one foot on the other side of the fence is where the passing vehicles begin. You could touch them, if you were silly enough to try. They are that close.

And a bicyclist would ride … where?

Nowhere, is the answer.

Since I have been here, and I’m in my third month, I haven’t seen two dozen cyclists. And maybe half of them have been guys on ingeniously designed two-wheelers that sustain the riders’ business — delivering or picking up propane gas tanks. And moving very very slowly down the street. A few feet at a time.

Otherwise, it’s been a handful of people … and my universal thought is, “That guy/girl must have a death wish.”

Sidewalks are impassible, so that is out. Which puts cyclists on the street. Where there is, quite literally, not enough room for a bus to pass you.

Maybe the only people who could pull this off — riding a bike in downtown HK Island — would be elite cyclists who could get up to 20-25 mph in a matter of a few feet so as not to be run over by vehicles tearing away from a green light. They would also have to be nimble enough to dodge the inevitable errant or erratic driver veering in front of them. And they would have to be able to stop almost instantly because that’s what the motor vehicles do.

It’s just no doable, for everyone else.

We were on the “empty” side of the island the other day, and even though it has greenery, it is hurting for roads (and many of those are quite hilly, but that’s just a minor part of the problem). We were sitting on the second deck of a bus, toward the front, and the bus seemed to occupy about 99.9 percent of the traffic lane.

Ahead of us was a cyclist. Wearing a helmet. A guy who looked in shape. But he could not keep pace with the bus, and he couldn’t go left or right, in this claustrophobic corridor of a road … and after riding madly just a few feet ahead of us for about 100 yards, a span of asphalt that, had he lost control or slowed too quickly, would have been smeared with both bike and rider, the bus caught up to him.

I held my breath.

Finally, the road widened just enough … maybe two feet … that the bus driver was able to blow past the cyclist — who had maybe six inches on either side of his tires to keep from being hit by the bus or tumbling off the road.

Anyway, no. Bicycles are a great idea for a lot of places. Most places. But Hong Kong Island? Never. It will never, ever work where 98 percent of us live and go to the office.