Betting on the bike in a car-crazy city
A free bike-share program and a new five-kilometre bike path is cause for celebration among city cyclists.
As they rolled through Caracas’s crime-ridden streets on a recent evening, popping wheelies and shouting anti-car slogans at puzzled motorists, some 50 cycling activists were in a celebratory mood.
Long accustomed to being on the losing end of their battle to make Venezuela’s car-crazed capital a little less terrifying for two-wheelers, the buzz on their monthly rush-hour ride to raise awareness about the city’s most vulnerable commuters was about a new bike path snaking through downtown.
“You don’t know how hard we fought for this,” said Mariano Montilla, who was cruising on a 1970s Japanese-made road bike.
While Latin American metropolises from Buenos Aires to Mexico City began promoting the bicycle as an alternative to traffic gridlock years ago, Caracas has been a regional holdout. The world’s cheapest gasoline — less than five cents a gallon — has made the city one of the world’s most car-centric, with a glut of Nixon-era gas guzzlers clogging the roadways.
That’s why Mayor Jorge Rodriguez’s seemingly quixotic bet on the bike has elicited widespread praise. Part of an ongoing effort to reclaim blighted public spaces, the socialist mayor inaugurated last month the final stretch of a dedicated bike path, complete with Venezuela’s first suspension bridge exclusively for cyclists and a giant monument in the shape of a wheel. The city also launched a free bikeshare program with more than 100 green Atomic bicycles, a local brand built in partnership with Iran.
That’s not to say militant activists such as Montilla are satisfied. Far from it.
For one thing, they complain about the fixed-gear Iranian loaners, which they say were chosen for political reasons despite being of dubious quality.
There’s also the short length of Caracas’s bike path: just over five kilometres, compared with more than 300 kilometres of dedicated lanes in Bogota, Colombia, which pioneered promotion of bike commuting two decades ago.
But despite the bike program’s shortcomings, it has stirred a sense of civic pride — something in short supply among Venezuelans beset by long lines for scarce foodstuffs, triple-digit inflation and one of the world’s highest murder rates.
Ricardo Montezuma, a Bogota-based urban planner, said embracing the bike can go a long way toward rebuilding Venezuelans’ faith in responsive local government. Caracas regularly ranks alongside war zones among the world’s least livable cities.
“To have done this now — when Venezuela isn’t at its most glorious moment, when there is so much hardship and money is short — is very admirable,” said Montezuma, whose Human City Foundation consults for bike-share programs around Latin America, including Caracas. “If Caracas goes for it, any city can.”