Improving life in Bogota by empowering citizens to cycle

La Ciudad Verde, a Colombian think tank, is seeking to end the country's love affair with the car by making cycling and walking safer and sexier
Bogota smog
The smog that veils Bogota is testament to its citizen's love affair with the car Photograph: Caroline Holtum for the Guardian Caroline Holtum/Guardian

At 2,625m above sea level, Bogota is one of the world's highest capital cities. Take the cable car up Monserrate, the mountain that rises a further 500m above the Colombian capital, and you can see the footprint of the entire city. From up here you can just make out the bustling downtown area through a veil of smog. Major arteries clogged with cars bisect the city; even this far up the soundtrack is the buzz of heavy traffic.

As Colombia has returned to peace following the drug wars that blighted the 80s and 90s, economic development has been rapid. Out of this new wealth, a love affair with the car has blossomed – and so too have Bogota's traffic jams.

Official estimates put the number of cars on the city's roads at around 1.5m, up from 950 000 in 2009. The road network wasn't built to cope with this volume of cars, leaving Bogota's citizens sitting in traffic and choking on toxic fumes (a 2010 report ranked air pollution related respiratory diseases as the main cause of death in young children in Bogota).

A succession of mayors in the late 1990s and early 2000s sought to ease the city's transport woes, introducing the world's first large-scale Bus Rapid Transport system (BRT) and a 400km network of cycle lanes, backed up with pro-cycling policies including car-free days and closing certain streets to cars on Sundays.

Walter Hook, the head of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York, says that commuting trips by bicycle rose from less than 0.5% to over 2% in just three years. Research by Mejor en Bici (Better by Bike), a social enterprise that promotes cycling based in the city, shows that the average resident spends 22 days a year traveling in the city, those who switch to cycling save up to eight days a year.

Cycling doesn't just save time and emissions in Bogota, it is a leveler. "If people are on bicycles they are equal, far more so than when they are in cars that could cost more than those on low wages could make in a lifetime," says Diego Ospina, who runs Mejor en Bici.

The sense of equality cycling brings is especially important in a country that ranks as the world's eighth most unequal. So when mayoral support for cycling ground to a halt (according to a report from the Colombian based foundation Despacio, the last two mayors have neglected cycling almost entirely), something needed to be done.

Frustrated by the lack of action by both the city and citizens, a group of young urbanists are seeking to put cycling back on the agenda. "We empower people to change cities with their own hands," says Carlos Cadena Gaitán, a member of La Ciudad Verde (The Green City)  an activist think tank born in Medellin, but now active in Colombia's three main cities.

"It is not our responsibility to provide infrastructure, in fact we aren't entitled to, but we can symbolically reproduce the circumstances that we would like to see."

La Ciudad Verde members identify places in the city where cycle lanes don't join up (of which there are plenty) and using social media bring citizens together to paint the connecting lanes themselves. The activity usually attracts plenty of local media coverage and ultimately has caught the attention of the city authorities, who have responded positively and offered to work with La Ciudad Verde.

It is not just cycle lanes that the group are joining up; 46% of journeys in the city are made on foot, yet road layouts and crossings can feel hazardous. In another intervention, the group brought citizens together to draw attention to the lack of pedestrian crossings at a notorious junction. They painted pedestrians wearing crowns on the road where a pedestrian crossing should have been – and a month later the authorities painted official crossings at the junction; which if not making the pedestrian king, at least saw them rise up the pecking order.

Bgota pedestrian king
Citizens and members of La Ciudad Verde paint pedestrian kings at a dangerous crossing in Bogota

In a country where cars are firmly connected with status, La Ciudad Verde's focus is not only on nudging authorities to improve infrastructure but also on shifting cultural perceptions around transport. Another initiative saw the group harnessing the power of celebrity to make cycling sexy. In March 2013, some of the country's most famous footballers, politicians, models and actors were convinced to use electric bikes for a day and share their experiences on social media. The initiative helped give cycling a coolness boost, going some way towards making a sustainable choice an aspirational one.

Héctor Buitrago
Héctor Buitrago, singer from uber-famous Colombian rock band Aterciopelados tries out an electric bike for the day in Bogota

The group received a Cycling Visionaries award from the global Velo-City programme hosted in Vienna in 2013, a programme designed to support new ideas for urban cycling cultures, and are now taking their message global. Yesterday, more than 200 groups participated in simultaneous action to promote better urban cycling conditions. In the event, #Bikes4Life, participants from five continents were asked to generate any creative action in favour of urban cycling as a "citizen's gift" to their city. In Kampala, Uganda, the African Bicycle Network organised a massive cycling party, in Delft, the Netherlands, students provided free bicycle lights to fellow cyclists, in Asunción, Paraguay, artists unveiled an urban monument made out of used bicycle parts.

It is La Ciudad Verde's open, generous and creative approach that might just make the view from the top of Monserrate a little clearer and help Bogota become a cleaner more equal place along the way. Yesterday's initiative suggests that their approach could be replicated around the world to empower citizens to step up and provide some of the answers to the challenges that businesses and city governments face in enabling sustainable lifestyles.