Seven to Two, No Cars: Bogotá's Ciclovía — Epoche B1
Seven to two, no cars Every Sunday, and on public holidays too, Bogotá closes its main roads to cars. Not one street for a fair — about 120 kilometres of ordinary avenues, including the Carrera Séptima through the centre, from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. The event is called the Ciclovía, it has run since 1974, and on a good Sunday more than a million people come out into the road: cyclists, runners, skaters, dogs, prams, grandmothers walking arm in arm down what on Monday will be six lanes of traffic again. I ride it most weeks with my sister, and we have our favourite stretch, so I am not neutral. But the argument around it is worth setting out honestly. The case against is real. Drivers lose the city's spine for seven hours. A delivery that crosses town takes twice as long. Some shopkeepers along the route complain that customers in cars cannot reach them, and every few years a politician proposes cutting the hours back. The case for is a health argument, and it is simple. A gym charges money; the Ciclovía is free, and it reaches people no gym reaches. Along the route the city also runs the Recreovía — open-air stages where instructors lead aerobics and dance classes at no cost, and the crowd in front runs from about four years old to eighty. For a family without a car, which is an ordinary situation here, it is also the one safe place to teach a child to ride a bicycle. The city's answer to the argument has been to keep the thing running for fifty years, and cities around the world have copied it. Seven hours a week, the street stops being a road and becomes the city's largest park. References Montoya, E. (2018). Food and Culture in Latin America. University Press of the Andes.