A Metrobus stop on 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires, with the famous Obelisk in the background. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 6 2014 (IPS)

Sustainable transport grew in the Latin American cities of Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro in 2013.

The left-wing government of the Mexican capital inaugurated the fifth Metrobús bus rapid transit (BRT) system route and extended the Ecobici Individual Transport System.

It also expanded the Ecoparq parking meter system – a new parking management scheme – into new areas on the west side of the city and opened up a new pedestrian-only street in the old city.

In the Argentine capital, meanwhile, the third Metrobús line began to operate with great success on Avenida 9 de Julio, and the government expanded its “Buenos Aires, mejor en bici” (Buenos Aires, Better by Bike) programme.

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the centre-right city government forged ahead with the construction of the Transcarioca and Transbrasil BRT corridors, while the second stage of the Transoeste BRT project got underway.

The network of bicycle paths was also enlarged, as part of the infrastructure planned for the FIFA World Cup, to be held in Brazil from Jun. 12 to Jul. 13, and the 2016 Olympic summer games in Rio de Janeiro.

In Mexico City, “there have been interesting projects, but they haven’t been carried out at the desired speed,” Bernardo Baranda, Latin America director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS.

He called for more initiatives and said they should be more rapidly implemented, aimed at “a further reduction of the use of automobiles” in greater Mexico City, home to more than 20 million people.

As part of that objective, he said it was important to expand Ecobici, which includes exclusive and non-exclusive bike lanes as well as a bike-share system.

What is happening in greater Rio de Janeiro, population 11.7 million, “is very exciting,” he said. “A great deal has been invested in infrastructure. Bicycle use has expanded. The centre has great potential for better transport conditions.”

The ITDP Latin America director said that in greater Buenos Aires, home to some 13 million people, “the use of public bicycles has been fomented, along with the idea of turning several streets in the microcenter into pedestrian-only.”

Roberto Remes, an independent Mexican expert in public policies on the environment and transportation, also pointed to interesting developments in the three cities.

He explained to IPS that in Buenos Aires, right-wing Mayor Mauricio Macri “is trying to build an alternative system to the subway,” which turned 100 years old in December.

Meanwhile, “in Mexico we see mainly plans. Apparently we’ll do ok, we’ll have an integrated system with policies focused on mobility and a person-oriented, rather than car-oriented, perspective.”

With respect to Rio de Janeiro, he said “they want their prepaid public fare cards and their institutional image to be the same across the entire country – something that not many countries have achieved.”

The three cities face similar challenges, such as heavy dependence on private vehicles, the proliferation of parking garage buildings, and virtually no progress on road safety, except in the case of Buenos Aires.

In addition, there have been social protests against the infrastructure work accompanying the development of sustainable, multimodal transportation systems.

Baranda said “the bicycle must be better integrated with mass transit, and more integrated transport is needed in order to make it easier to get around.”

On Jan. 15, the ITDP and eight other organisations will grant the Sustainable Transport Award in Washington, DC. This year’s nominees include Buenos Aires, Lanzhou, China and Suwon, South Korea. Mexico City won the award in 2013.

The prize, granted since 2005 to cities of more than 500,000 people, awards accomplishments such as improving public transportation and public spaces, reducing transport-related air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and improving safety and access for cyclists and pedestrians.

This year, the Mexico City government will build another Metrobús line and will expand segregated and non-segregated bike paths.

For its part, the ITDP will focus on reducing the number of parking garages, and drew up a study on the viability of a Metrobús line on the central Avenida Reforma.

For the 2013-2016 period, the Rio de Janeiro city administration plans to build 150 km of bike paths, as well as bicycle parking stations, to reach a total network of 450 km by 2016.

Buenos Aires projects the creation of another four Metrobús routes for 2014-2015.

The December report on “Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts of BRT Systems” stresses the benefits of bus rapid transit in Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Istanbul, Turkey.

The report was produced by EMBARQ, the sustainable urban transport and planning programme of the World Resources Institute (WRI).

The study shows that BRT systems have led to travel time savings, a reduction in vehicle operating costs, improvements in health due to reduced pollution, and improved road safety.

But it also identifies challenges such as declining quality of service, the exclusion of the poorest residents from the system, limited integration with other transport systems, and competition with subways.

Remes warned that it was not enough to focus transport strategies on merely establishing BRT systems without addressing other possibilities, such as urban trains.

“The existing models of financing, management and planning only allow for the expansion of these systems. If we create BRT corridors, we can cover the cities in a decade, but there is still a problem: transfers and switches from one system to another. There’s something that’s not working in the long-term vision,” he said.

In the 1970s, nations like Japan, South Korea or Singapore began to build railway networks to foment a mix of transport, employment, financing and economic development in big cities.

In Latin America, “we are a millennium behind,” Remes lamented.

Bogotá is famous for its vast network of bike lanes. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Dec 17 2013 (IPS)

“I ride 43 km a day and I love it,” said Carlos Cantor in Bogotá, Colombia. “Five years ago I switched my car for a bike,” explained Tomás Fuenzalida from Santiago, Chile.

They are both part of the burgeoning growth of cycling as a transport solution in Latin America.

But in the second-most urbanised region in the world, public sentiment towards bicycles is mixed, with some seeing them as a symbol of low socioeconomic status, says the “Biciciudades 2013” study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) with regard to the expansion of this sustainable means of transport in large and medium-sized cities in the region.

The report, based on surveys and commissioned by the IDB’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative, found that between 0.4 and 10 percent of the population in the region use a bicycle as their main means of transportation.

Among the cities studied, Cochabamba in Bolivia heads the list, with 10 percent of the population depending on the bicycle. It is followed by La Paz, Bolivia, and Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, with five percent. All of these are intermediate cities with populations between 100,000 and two million people.

Among the big cities, in Santiago and Mexico City, three percent of the population use bicycles as their main means of transport, followed by Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, and Bogotá, with two percent.

Bogotá is known as a world leader in bike paths, with 376 km of “ciclorutas” or dedicated lanes – one of the most extensive networks in the world – and 120 km of recreational paths. In addition, car traffic is cut on some streets on Sundays and holidays.

Cantor, a 58-year-old communications specialist, took a break from his daily ride to tell Tierramérica about his experience cycling in the city. “You can go fast, because there’s no traffic; on some stretches I even enjoy the greenery and the quiet,” he said. “There’s a lot of solidarity, and you make friends.”

The Secretariat of Mobility of the Capital District estimates that in Bogotá, a city of around eight million people, local residents make about 450,000 bike trips a day. The largest group of bicycle users are manual labourers and factory workers, followed by students from lower-income families.

The recreational bike paths date back to 1974 and are used by an average of one million people every Sunday.

“I love the [recreational] bike paths, I use them every Sunday,” law student Carolina Mejía told Tierramérica. “But I don’t use the ciclorutas, because many of them havent’ been completed yet, and there are stretches that you have to share with cars and buses, and that scares me. Also, it’s not safe.”

Cantor agreed that there are safety concerns: “Every day bicycles are stolen, and there’s a brisk trade in stolen bicycles. In a question of seconds they change the colour with a spray can and your bike disappears.” But he said “people learn to use less pretentious bikes, and they put marks on them so it’s harder to sell them underground.”

Fuenzalida, 44, swapped his car for a bike in the Chilean capital “for my health,” because “you get exercise without paying a single peso in the gym” and because “it is much nicer to ride a bike than to take the subway, for example.”

The public relations specialist not only pedals to work, but also uses the bike to take his kids to school, go to meetings, or visit family members.

For people like him, the Santiago city government is implementing a “master plan” to extend bike lanes to a total of 933 km. The city currently has 215 km of bike lanes, while there are 130 km of paths in adjacent rural municipalities.

Greater Santiago is home to over five million people.

“This is one of the keys to increasing the use of bicycles, and for the city and residents of Santiago to see the benefits in the easing of traffic congestion and for health and the environment,” the Chilean government’s spokesperson Cecilia Pérez told Tierramérica.

The mayor of the Santiago metropolitan area, Juan Antonio Peribonio, told Tierramérica that the plan would be ready in 2022 and that lanes were being built to connect the existing paths. To that will be added a public system to lend out bicycles, in order to promote cycling.

But not everything is positive for cyclists. “Sometimes pedestrians, taxi drivers or car drivers insult me, they call me stupid,” said Laurie Fachaux, a 28-year-old French journalist who has lived in Chile for a few months. “They should get used to the fact that I have a right to be on the streets just like they do.”

Antonia Larraín, 37, believes that part of the problem is the lack of regulations protecting cyclists. “If an accident happens, there is total impunity,” said the psychologist, who pedals 13 km a day to and from work.

Enrique Rojas, 50, who has driven a taxi for 30 years in Santiago, reflected the other side of the coin. “Cyclists are careless, they wind in and out of the cars and don’t respect traffic signals; I have often almost hit one of them because they didn’t stop for a red light or because they were riding at night without any light,” he commented to Tierramérica.

“Cyclists should also have to take out a permit, and bicycles should have licence plates. They shouldn’t just be able to get on their bikes and not worry about anything – they leave their safety in the hands of others,” he complained.

But bicycle use is growing nonetheless, like in greater Mexico City, which has a population of around 20 million.

“It has been a relatively short process,” said Xavier Treviño, director of the Mexican office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). “The greatest success has been turning cycling into an alternative means of transport, and the main strength has been promotion of cycling,” he told Tierramérica.

The most visible symbol of cycling in the Mexican capital is the Ecobici Individual Transportation System, which since its launch in 2010 has drawn 87,000 users of 4,000 bicycles at 275 stations along 22 km of paths. Users register and pay 31 dollars a year.

Mexico City also has 90 km of separated and non-separated bike lanes. “Systems like Ecobici provide incentives for continued growth. It’s positive inertia. But infrastructure is lacking. All main roads should have infrastructure for bicycles,” Treviño said.

According to Ecociudades 2013, nearly all of the 18 intermediate and six large cities studied have bike lanes, with the exception of Asunción, Paraguay and Manizales, Colombia.

But only Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Asunción, La Paz and Montevideo – the capital of Uruguay – have regulations for urban cycling, as Rojas, the taxi driver, was calling for.

With reporting by Helda Martínez (Bogotá), Emilio Godoy (Mexico City) and Marianela Jarroud (Santiago).

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.