Written by guest authors:
Thomas van Laake, doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester
Henk-Jan Dekker, post-doctoral researcher at CIRED
The early 1970’s marked a critical juncture in the history of urban cycling, with oil crises, dramatic declines in road safety, and growing environmental concerns framing the bicycle as a transportation solution. Despite awareness of shared problems, the decade also saw cities diverge: as Dutch cities moved to develop urban cycling networks in response to road safety campaigning, their North American counterparts legalized ‘right turn on red’ as a fuel economy measure amidst a short-lived ‘bike boom’.
A different history was being written in the rapidly urbanizing Colombian capital Bogotá. On the 14th of December, 1974, visionary cycling activists were given permission to host a Gran Manifestación del Pedal (Great Pedalling Manifestation), closing a circuit of streets to car traffic and opening them to bicycles. Perhaps most surprisingly, the event was held again in 1975, became public policy under the moniker ‘Ciclovía’ in 1976.
After being fully institutionalized and scaled up in 1995, the Ciclovía has comprised over 120 kilometres of traffic-free routes across the city, opened between 7 am and 2 pm every Sunday and public holiday (up to 70 times a year). With some dates estimated to attract over 2 million users, this event’s recreational and experiential nature is well captured by its slogan: “Bogotá doesn’t have the sea, but it has the Ciclovía”. In a congested and often chaotic city scarred by insecurity and violence, founder Jaime Ortiz considers the event “the largest civic classroom in the world”.
While it’s longevity, scale, and usage are impressive in their own right, the Ciclovía’s impacts go far beyond giving bogotanos a respite from motorized traffic and enamouring foreign visitors. The event is widely regarded as the catalyst for the subsequent development of Bogotá’s bicycle policies; today, the city boasts the longest cycling network in Latin America and a significant and a significant and growing bicycle mode share (at around 7% of trips). However, perhaps the most significant influence of the Ciclovía has been the replication of the event beyond Bogotá. Mobilized through networks of bicycle advocates, circulated through media such as Streetfilms, and scaled up to national policy in Colombia, the event has inspired over 400 cities around the world to adopt similar open streets initiatives.[1]
The local impacts and global referencing of the Ciclovía have contributed to Bogotá’s growing renown as a cycling city amongst policymakers and academics. Yet rather than constitute it as a model, the Colombian capital’s idiosyncratic trajectory of bicycle promotion demonstrates that cycling policies (or, indeed, should!) take different forms and pathways in different places; the place simply doesn’t fit on the imaginary linear hierarchy running from ‘starter city’ to ‘Utrecht’ that structures much contemporary cycling policymaking.
On the margins of bicycle scholarship and advocacy that works to overcome opposition to cycling policies by saying “if X city did this, yours can too!”, an emerging body of historical and anthropological research on cycling cultures and policies has emphasized the particularities and idiosyncrasies of the sites where ‘best practices’ emanate from (including the Netherlands) and ‘arrive’, describing path-dependent and context-specific systems of velómobility. Bogotá is a particularly productive location to think about these differences, and local researchers have articulated calls to pluralize cycling scholarship which, as Paola Castañeda suggests, would understand cycling cities not as “variations on a theme”, but “distinct sites where innovations, practices, aspirations, and standards for cycling are being enacted and which could be written as referents for cycling.”[2]
At an academic conference at Bogotá’s Universidad de los Andes organized for the occasion and attended by the authors of piece, celebrations of the Ciclovía’s transformative impacts were complemented by close attention to its contested history, the social practices and (in)formal economies that have grown around it, and its contribution to the urban and civic development of Bogotá itself. Meanwhile, discussions on the replication of open streets events in sites such as Los Angeles, Cape Town, and Santiago de Chile, emphasized the need to negotiate and adapt to distinct local politics, municipal institutions, and urban configurations. Recognizing that Bogotá’s weekly, city-wide network format doesn’t work for every city, international advocates highlighted the different forms (i.e. separate circuits, linear routes, local streets) and temporalities (i.e. seasonal, monthly, night-time) that open streets events can take.
The Ciclovía’s golden anniversary reminds us that the trajectories of cycling cities are both connected and separate, as shared problems give rise to different solutions and learning from elsewhere requires ‘translation’ and adaptation to local conditions. From a Dutch perspective, there are two evident lessons – neither of which is that Amsterdam needs a Ciclovía of its own. Firstly, that half a century of cycling promotion warrants celebrating and reflecting on. Second, and most importantly for cycling research, that Dutch cycling policy is only one of many pathways for cycling promotion; it is profoundly particular and can only be made ‘universal’ by abstracting away from the conditions that made it successful.
References
[1] For an academic account of this process of policy mobility, see Montero, S. (2017). Worlding Bogotá’s ciclovía: from urban experiment to international “best practice”. Latin American Perspectives, 44(2), 111-131.
[2] Castañeda, P. (2021). Cycling case closed? A situated response to Samuel Nello-Deakin’s “Environmental determinants of cycling: Not seeing the forest for the trees?”. Journal of Transport Geography, 90, p. 2
