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A new study shows that cycle paths reduce road accidents and prevent premature deaths. The city government had promised to remove several sections but is now faced with the limits of a policy that is too regressive.
Franco lives in Lanús and works at the Military Geographic Institute in the Palermo neighborhood. “I come here every day by bike. It’s about 18 kilometers per trip,” he tells me via WhatsApp. “I started almost three years ago. At first I came just one or two days a week until I got into the swing of things and started coming every day.”
From Lanús, in the southern area of ??Greater Buenos Aires, Franco crosses the Valentín Alsina bridge and goes up to Córdoba Avenue, where the Horacio Rodríguez Larreta administration inaugurated new exclusive lanes for cyclists in 2020. “The crappiest part, if you will, I get on the way back, when I pass a few blocks from Barrio 21–24 at an hour when there arent many people, but I go by relatively quickly.”
Francos story is quite unique, but far from unique. Theres Miguel, the security guard who travels daily from Congreso to Montserrat on his old grey bicycle. Julián, the office worker who goes to work on a rented EcoBici. The delivery man from a butchers shop who uses the Marcelo T. de Alvear cycle path in Retiro. Marías son, who at 12 started riding his bike to school alone.
In recent years, bicycles have accounted for 10% of all trips made in the City of Buenos Aires. Today, it is more than just a fashion or a recreational activity; it is just another means of transport. The reasons behind this phenomenon are not cultural or aesthetic, but structural. Official figures show that its use increased tenfold between 2009 and 2019 thanks to the deployment and expansion of a network of protected cycle paths.
As the Buenos Aires City government explained at the time, encouraging the use of bicycles as a sustainable means of mobility was “a strategic policy for the City.” And the electorate revalidated this policy, re-electing PRO, the ruling party, in each of the local elections.
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But something broke in December.
Macri vs. Macri
The arrival of Jorge Macri to the government – ??handpicked as a candidate by his cousin Mauricio and winner by a narrow margin of an internal election where he took 28% of the votes in the open primaries – marked a break with the more progressive policies of his predecessor. And one of the aspects where this change was most clearly seen was in the policies of sustainable mobility.
Shortly before the general elections, Macri (p) surprised everyone by starting a campaign against the cycle path on Avenida del Libertador, which he himself had inaugurated as a Rodríguez Larreta official. “We need to review that cycle path. It is poorly executed. We made a mistake,” he said in a television interview. (Two years earlier he had presented the project and praised its role “so that more residents choose this safe and sustainable means of transport.”)
This month, he seems to have come to his senses. “It is a more complex decision because a lot of work has been done, which means that more work has to be done, meaning spending a lot of money again, slowing down and complicating traffic,” he told the newspaper La Nación. But in the same report, he confirmed “changes” to the bike lanes, including the possibility of eliminating the dedicated lanes on Marcelo T. de Alvear and other streets. These decisions, he says, are the result of “the review of the entire bike lane network,” a report that has not yet been released.
The back and forth was reflected in the organizational chart. The first Secretary of Transportation of the new administration, Jorge Kogan, proposed to resolve “the traffic chaos” in the City. He lasted ten months in office, and his departure occurred for reasons that are still unknown, but it is difficult to imagine him succeeding without an underground transportation policy or sustainable mobility (the bike lanes, he said, were the result of the campaign of “a noisy minority”).
The new official in the area, Guillermo Krantzer, was clearer in his position. “The urban intervention on Av. del Libertador is much more than a bike lane. Like any other work, it can be improved, but Libertador will continue to have a bike lane,” he said on his X account.
So, what is Jorge Macris view on bicycle transport? In March, in an interview on Channel 9, the following dialogue took place.
"I didnt come to remove the bike lanes," said the head of the Buenos Aires government.
–Are they going to do more? – wanted to know the journalist Ramón Indart.
–In some places we probably will.
But there were no announcements of new cycle paths, either during the campaign or in almost a year of management, whose expansion is frozen at 300 kilometres since Rodriguez Larreta left office, less than other cities in the region such as Bogotá (630 kilometres), Santiago de Chile (490) and Rio de Janeiro (307).
A boy and an adult last Saturday on the bike path on Libertador Avenue, north of Buenos Aires. Photo: Federico Poore
The bike path that saves lives
Speaking of Bogotá, this year a new study was published on the impact of bike paths on public health. The article, published in the scientific journal Transport and Environment by a group of researchers from the Universidad de los Andes, concluded that the establishment of bike paths in the Colombian capital reduced cyclist road accidents by 56% and prevented 145 premature deaths due to increased physical activity.
“The findings highlight the main barriers and drivers of cycling, as well as the potential benefits of implementing cycle lanes, including a reduction in stress related to cycling and reduced road accidents involving cyclists,” commented Professors Maria Alejandra Wilches Mogollon and Dario Hidalgo.
A study in 106 European cities showed that every new kilometre of protected cycle paths increased bicycle journeys by 0.6%. The explanation is simple: in order for the number of cyclists to grow, the first thing to do is to create the conditions for them to feel safe. As Kevin Costner said in Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”
But how much truth is there in the fear of retailers that sales will fall because people cannot leave their cars at the door of the store? Science says that this is unfounded. On the contrary, the installation of cycle paths does not impact retail sales and may even increase them, as proven by studies over the last decade in cities such as Toronto and San Francisco.
Someone has to give
Leonardo Spinetto is a graphic designer living in Buenos Aires. He has been running Bicivilizados Radio, a weekly programme dedicated to urban cycling, for over a decade, and I asked him how he saw the current state of the network in the capital.
“Paradoxically, cycle paths are being left unprotected. We should be discussing which ones need to be improved, re-asphalted, studying intersections better, how we extend the network and where, but we are moving towards the idea of ??abandoning them as part of an anti-woke agenda,” Leonardo tells me.
“Transport is increasing, as is the price of petrol. It is the best time to expand the cycle network. We have a climate crisis right on our heels and creating infrastructure for people who move around by bicycle is fast, cheap, simple and offers a lot to a city,” he explains.
42% of bicycle trips are made by women. This percentage has increased in recent times thanks to the available infrastructure and better safety conditions. Photos: Leo Spinetto / X
The Bicivilizados driver recalls that, according to official data from the Buenos Aires government, 56% of the trips made daily in Buenos Aires are less than 5 kilometers, which offers enormous opportunities to replace at least some of these journeys with active modes.
“Exponential use is noticeable on the street and the key is to offer facilities for efficient transport for the city on possible, short and medium-term trips, so that there are more and more of them and that frees up space for those who cannot do it by bicycle, and even frees up space for public transport,” concludes Leonardo.
This last point is central. It is not a question of re-enacting the false dichotomy between motorists and cyclists (many of us are both, alternately). But well into the 21st century, any metropolitan public policy must start from the recognition that the number of private cars in circulation must be limited by means of disincentive policies. Some of these consist of taxing these modes, because they are polluting and, above all, inefficient. Others have to do with improving the alternatives, which include public transport and active modes, which contrary to what is usually assumed, represent the vast majority of trips in the city (as we have already said, cars represent less than 24% of total trips).
“The trend to reduce the role of cars as the main target of urban policies is seen in almost all member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),” says the Inter-American Development Bank’s urban road safety guide. It is not an ideological issue or an invention of George Soros: it is the limit imposed by the most basic transportation engineering.
At one point, the anti-cycling argument was to repeat that “we are not Amsterdam”, implying that the commitment to this type of policy was a luxury for European cities smaller than ours. But it is enough to see what all comparable metropolises are doing at this point. New York, Paris, Berlin, Milan, London, Kuala Lumpur, Xiamen, Bogotá or Santiago all have plans to expand their network of protected cycle paths and limit the space previously dedicated to cars.
Nicholas Boys Smith, a researcher at the University of Buckingham, summed up his advice to local authorities as follows: “Don’t hate cars. Don’t wage war on drivers. But don’t wage war on them either. Instead, strive for happy, healthy, prosperous and productive neighbourhoods. Voters will thank you for it.” |
