Cycling in Bogotá: Meet the man driving the Mayor’s plan

Bogotá Bicycle Manager David Uniman. (Bolívar Magazine)

David Uniman believes in the bicycle. And in Bogotá. Inspired by cycling cultures in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the Gerente de la Secretaría Distrital de Movilidad (Manager, Department of Mobility) oversees the development of Bogotá’s cycling infrastructure, engages community leaders in cycling for social development, and leads efforts to educate riders on proper cycling etiquette.

These and other activities are part of Plan bici, Mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s ambitious four-year plan to double the number of cycling trips from five percent to 10 percent of all modes of transport by 2020.

What does your Department do?

Our core business is to improve the city’s cycling infrastructure and we do that in two main ways.

The first is building bike lanes. Right now, Bogotá has 480km of lanes in its network, which is the largest in the Americas. We’re building 40 km more as we speak; by year-end we hope to have added a full 200 km.

The second is increasing bike parking. Historically we’ve been severely lacking in this area, but we’re making progress on several fronts.

We’ve doubled parking in Transmilenio stations to 4,000 spots. We’re increasing the number of on-street parking racks, and we’re working with the new metro company to ensure that the stations will have underground parking facilities.

Cycling will be a part of a modern, integrated public transit system for Bogotá. (Alcaldía de Bogotá)

Parking lots in Bogotá are required to provide bike parking. (Alcaldía de Bogotá)

I want to make sure we have a network of public parking lots that accept bikes. By law, public lots are required to provide bike parking, but only about half of them do.

We’re working with the police and local authorities to shut down the lots that aren’t in compliance.

Another project that I want to fund is to use remodeled shipping containers in strategic public places, like Parque el Virrey and Parque 93. These crates provide parking for up to 50 bikes.

The other part of our job is to co-ordinate and guide the many other cycling initiatives going on in the city.

Tourism wants to promote Bogotá as a cycling destination. Economic Development runs a program that teaches low-income individuals to be bike mechanics. Education runs a “Kids to School” program in which guides pick up kids on their bikes and escort them to school.

Cycling is going to be a part of a modern, integrated public transit system. We want Bogotá to be on par with Copenhagen. So we need to develop the infrastructure from multiple angles.

Our ambition is that by 2019, we’ll have a good part of the picture completed.

How important is cycling to the current mayor?

Mayor Peñalosa has a very clear vision for cycling. He wants us to prioritize it to the point where children can travel safely on a tricycle or bicycle.

That’s what we’re doing – on 11th avenue, for example – we’ve created segregated bike lanes that are safe and comfortable for parents to put their kids on bikes and just go.

This has been his vision since his first term as mayor, nearly 20 years ago. He was inspired by what he saw in the Netherlands and Denmark.

These countries have extensive cycling infrastructures and mature cycling cultures. At the time, Bogotá had nothing. So he imported the model and started building the infrastructure.

It was a very unpopular decision at the time because there was no support for it. But now, 20 years later, Bogotanos make about 700,000 cycling trips per day – as many as there are by car.

People in the northern part of the city don’t see it, but 80 percent of those trips are taken by the three lowest income levels. If you go to the south or the west, the cycling infrastructure is enormous.

We’ve covered the infrastructure. Talk to me about cycling culture in Bogotá

One of the most interesting developments of the last 20 years is the growth of independent citizen cycling advocacy groups. They started to pop up at the same time as the first ciclorutas.

They’re very diverse – some football club supporters’ groups work with violent youths to help them socialize through cycling. Some groups ride with people who’ve been displaced by violence.

On International Women’s Day we had 500 women riding through the city. Some groups are aligned with political parties. They’re all very passionate and committed.

David Uniman (r) meets with community leaders on cycling initiatives. (Jorge Torres)

We work with these groups through IDPAC, which is the department of citizen participation. We have programs that give them a space to voice their concerns, to listen, and to include them in our own initiatives.

Last year we held an ideas competition on improving road safety. The groups with the two top ideas won money to implement their programs. We’re doing more this year.

We’re also trying to improve cycling etiquette because we think it saves lives. We hire actors to educate people on helmet use, how to use hand signals, and the right way to cycle.

Every year about 60 cyclists are killed in the city. This year we managed to reduce that number for the first time.

What are the biggest challenges to overcome in this grand vision?

It’s very difficult to put all the pieces together. Things take a lot longer to achieve than people think they should, especially when you’re working within a legal framework.

If the laws we need to follow are outdated, we need to update them first. That involves planning, design, studies, financing, and so on.

One practical challenge involves traffic lights. Intersections are the biggest area of concern with regards to safety; adding bike lanes means modifying the traffic lights.

Bogotá just tendered a completely new, smart, and modern traffic light system. It will take two years to implement, so that limits the number of bike lanes we can add in the meantime.

The C40 Cities Finance Facility and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) have helped Bogotá through detailed studies and workshops. (Alacaldía de Bogotá)

Also, some of the bike lanes we want to build involve building new infrastructure. But the Public Works Department has a long queue of infrastructure projects including new Transmilenio trunk lines, the new metro, and new schools.

These projects take priority over adding more bike lanes, so we don’t expect to have them built until 2019.

Cycling is also part of the city’s big strategic projects – four new Transmilenio corridors on 68th, 7th, Boyacá, and Cali. They’re all going to have bike lanes, but they won’t be done until 2021.

The metro will also have bike lanes, but it’s even further out.

How will this improve the lives of everyday people?

The competitiveness of the bike is indisputable. We know people save time using it. Two years ago we surveyed people why they bike. We got the same results as surveys in Copenhagen and Amsterdam: it saves time.

Bogotá boasts the largest cycling network in the Americas. (Alcaldía de Bogotá)

I work in the industrial area out past the airport. Getting there by car takes me an hour and a half. By bike it’s 45 minutes. I bike to work almost every day.

There’s a nice narrative about the romance of cycling and how it reduces air pollution, but really, most people just want to get places faster. Not everyone has a love affair with their bicycle itself. Everyone has a love affair with their time.

So you see cycling increasing in Bogotá?

Definitely. Cycling outpaced every mode of transportation between our last two mobility surveys. In 2015, cycling had a six percent share of daily trips. We’re hoping that by 2020 it will be 10 percent – that would be one million trips per day.

Mayor Peñalosa (l) and David Uniman (r) review cycling routes. (Alcaldía de Bogotá)

I think we can get there. The first thing is to expand the network, which we’re doing. The bigger challenge is redistributing public space. Academics and urbanists call this the “street fight.”

Public space is the scarcest resource in any city. There are always competing interests – pedestrians want nice wide sidewalks, restaurants want more outdoor seats, buses want dedicated lanes, drivers want more parking.

Bogotá Mayor Peñalosa wants to prioritize cycling to the point where children can travel safely on a tricycle. (Alcaldía de Bogotá)

The big question is, “What is a city street designed to do? What’s its purpose?” For many years, it was to move cars through them as quickly as possible.

But urbanism has evolved. Jane Jacobs called it a “sidewalk ballet” – an interplay of pedestrians, shop owners, and cyclists.

The big question is, “What is a city street designed to do? What’s its purpose?”

Bicycles are simply one of the actors in this ballet, but they’re the most controversial actors, because they take space away from the most vocal ones – car owners. Car owners are a minority, but their cars take up the most space and they don’t like giving it up.

The best-designed streets also provide a feeling of enclosure. It’s why we love European cities. That’s the shift we need to start making.

The other challenge is security.

A bike itself isn’t dangerous, but a bike lane can reflect a city’s problems. Bogotá is still a very Latin American city. It’s segregated between rich and poor, and that tension plays out in all of its social dynamics.

More than 200 police officers patrol Bogotá cycling routes. (Alcaldía de Bogotá)

Thefts have gone up and are often violent. It’s not petty theft, either – it’s organized criminal gangs that steal bikes, change their serial numbers, and ship them to other countries to sell.

We’ve been working incredibly hard with the police and with intelligence agencies to counter bike theft. We have more than 200 police offers on bicycles patrolling the bike lanes.

“A citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important as one in a $30,000 car.” Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa

We also have a partnership with the World Bank right now to learn more about bicycle security. We’re building a strategy to minimize, and hopefully, eliminate this problem.

So, things take a long time. But I think by the end of the Mayor’s current administration we’ll have a very clear strategy for fixing the security problem, which no one has tackled before.

Want more? Watch David’s presentation on Plan bici.