By Daniela Calone |
Montevideo (EFE).- With practically no connected bike lanes and no facilities to park bicycles, Montevideo is an unfriendly city with those who choose this means of transport to get around.
The four lanes full of cars and buses on Avenida 18 de Julio -the main avenue in the capital- are an example of this. There cyclists march between vehicles that move at a speed of up to 45 kilometers per hour.
This transit leads the most experienced to look for other less traveled routes to carry out their round trips.
a hostile place
Urban planner Reena Mahajan, founder of the Studio Diversity project, assured in a dialogue with EFE that Montevideo has a reputation for being “quiet” but it is “really very hostile and very dangerous” for pedestrians and cyclists.
He stresses that this is something that is shared by all the cities in the world whose urban design “invites others to accelerate”.
“(In Montevideo) the conditions for moving around by bicycle do not exist, we do not have safe cycle paths and we do not have networked cycle paths, because an important condition for being able to move by bike is to have a continuous, comfortable and attractive network of cycle paths,” points out the expert.
Accordingly, he adds that a city with bike lanes is “safer” for all users and “more sustainable.”
“It has so many benefits that it would be unwise not to use it to solve problems in the city,” says Mahajan.
Lack of infrastructure for cyclists
Gerónimo Olmando assures EFE that Montevideo is not prepared to receive an active cyclist who leaves early in the morning and returns home at night.
“Moving in Montevideo is not difficult, I encourage it and I think it is good to do it, but it is an activity that must be planned. At the time that one chooses to move by bicycle, one must plan ”, emphasizes the urban cyclist who manages the networks of Fixie Uruguay.
He adds that the capital “needs to have” more infrastructure for cyclists, but that this does not mean painting the streets of the city to recognize a space for bicycles, but that what there should be is a public mobility policy.
For his part, Andrés Amodio, co-author of the book “La bici” and administrator of the Bicicleta.uy networks, maintains that moving around Montevideo “is not entirely friendly” and assures that to do so you have to want to.
He adds that for this you have to think about many things such as the path you are going to take, if it will be calm, if there will be traffic, if there will be bike lanes, if there will be a place to park or if the bicycle will be safe or not.
Less than 2%
Tim Voßkämper, a road engineer and member of the Ciudad Abierta Collective, told EFE that this arose from the concern that the city and mobility model in Montevideo “is not the most desired for people’s well-being.”
“How we move from one place to another has a lot of impact on the quality of life for ourselves and others. Those choices depend a lot on the options that I have and today the layout of the city invites us to drive by car”, he underlines.
He adds: “We want to put the issue on the table and make people more aware of it so that decision makers see this problem as a real problem for everyone and can make decisions favoring the quality of life in the city and the sustainable mobility and not to the current model”.
On the other hand, he assures that currently 1.7% of trips within Montevideo are made by bicycle and explains that the infrastructure must be improved not by those who use this means of transport but by those who do not ride a bicycle, that to improve conditions surely would.
Cyclists, check your brakes
Of various designs and different colors, many bicycles wait for their turn at the entrance of the Tatti Road workshop, located in the Old City -historic center of the capital of the South American country-.
Inside, a chalk board warns about pending tasks and one of them stands out: “Check the brake parts”.
There Tatti Ezequiel Gutiérrez points out that in Montevideo “it is necessary to slow down” so that the city is safer for cyclists and pedestrians.
In dialogue with EFE, who began repairing this type of vehicle in 2018, while he was learning mechanics with the Libera tu Bicicleta collective, he says that in Uruguay there is a lack of information and education on this matter.
“There are more and more private cars and they are faster and faster, it is very difficult to move. I have been in traffic for 20 years and I am having moments when I get off and walk, because there are already places and rush hours that it is not possible to walk ”, he concludes.
Thus, several actors linked to the world of bicycles, some of them already in dialogue with the local government of Montevideo to find solutions to this problem, tell how they live the experience of using this means of transport while they wait for those changes that allow an improvement.