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globeandmail.com: Bogota's urban happiness movement

Bogota's urban happiness movement

From living hell to living well: A radical campaign to return streets from cars to people in Colombia's largest city is now a model for the world

CHARLES MONTGOMERY

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

June 25, 2007 at 4:32 PM EDT

On a clear, cloudless afternoon, Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota, leaves his office early in order to pick up his 10-year-old son from school. As usual, he wears his black leather shoes and pinstriped trousers. As usual, he is joined by his two pistol-packing bodyguards. And, as usual, he travels not in the armoured SUV typical of most public figures in Colombia, but on a knobby-tired mountain bike.

Mr. Peñalosa pedals through the streets of Santa Barbara in Bogota's well-to-do north side. He jumps curbs and potholes, riding one-handed, weaving across the pavement, barking into his cellphone with barely a thought for the city's notoriously aggressive drivers.

On most days, this would be a radical and perhaps suicidal act. But today is special.

Ever since citizens voted to make it an annual affair in 2000, private cars have been banned entirely from this city of nearly eight million every Feb. 1. On Dia Sin Carro, Car Free Day, the roar of traffic subsides and the toxic haze thins. Buses are jam-packed and taxis hard to come by, but hundreds of thousands of people have followed Mr. Peñalosa's example and hit the streets under their own steam.

ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America - Bogota

Cityscapes
Latin America and Beyond
Winter 2003
Bogotá

Arturo Ardila-Gómez

The sleek red bus zooms out of the station in northern Bogotá, a futuristic symbol of an (almost) transformed city. Nearby, thousands of cyclists of all ages enjoy a sunny morning on Latin America's largest bike-path network.

The TransMilenio, as the modern bus network is called, moves 750,000 passengers per weekday-almost 100,000 more than Washington D.C.'s subway system. And Bogotá's citizens are proud of their transportation, proud of their city.

That wasn't always the case. In 1988, during Colombia's first mayoral elections, a local radio station launched its own "virtual" candidate. The candidate's transport platform was simple: instead of fixing all the roads, why not remove the pavement remaining to level out potholes. Vehicles would then no longer have to "sink" into potholes-instead they would simply ride over the unpaved street.
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Seattle Channel -- Video

A New Vision for Developing Transit for Livable Cities 9/27/2006
Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogata, Columbia, addresses the issue of rapid transit. Penalosa describes his experience implementing TransMilenio, the world's model bus rapid transit system that moves over one million people a day. Over 20 percent of the system's riders have switched from driving cars to making the same trips via TransMilenio. Event presented by the Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, and Breakthrough Technologies Institute.

WNYC - News - Bikes Connecting Bogota and the South Bronx

Bikes Connecting Bogota and the South Bronx
by Andrea Bernstein