EBBC member Erica Stephan reports on the inspiring growth of the bicycling community in Guadalajara:
It’s a beautiful June night and the downtown plaza, full of blinking red lights, cyclists, and the sound of bike horns ranging from duck squawks to deafening blasts. We wait for the waves of cars to clear along the busy 6-lane avenue until someone blows a whistle – “Take the street!” Hundreds of cyclists pour into the road. It’s exhilarating, dominating the massive arterials that just a few hours ago were packed with speeding trucks.
Though it reminds me of an East Bay Bike Party, this ride is in Guadalajara, the second-largest city in Mexico. It’s just one of 30 different organized rides to choose from every month in the city: rides for women, rides for families, polite rides, aggressive rides, costumed rides, naked rides, rides that follow every traffic law and rides that defiantly break them. And for all the differences in language and history, it seems that the bike movement here is gaining the same momentum, breaking down the same barriers at the same moment, as in Oakland and in cities around the world.
Tonight’s ride organizer is a six-year-old group called GDL en Bici (Guadalajara by Bike), the leading bike advocacy group in the city. When they started, there were almost no provisions for bikes in the city. Now, though activists are still fighting to get it implemented, there is an official city bike and pedestrian plan, a 41-mile long Sunday street closure, Via RecreActiva, that attracts 400,000 users every week, grassroots-run bike safety workshops for kids and adults, and more acceptance of riding in the culture.
“It started about six years ago with our first ride,” says Yerecua, one of the first organizers of the movement. “We had all felt isolated before. The day of that first ride we looked around at each other and realized how many of us there were.”
Today, GLD en Bici operates out of the Casa de Ciclista, a collaborative space in the hip residential neighborhood of Santa Teresa that offers free bike tune-ups every Tuesday and Thursday, free lodging for touring cyclists, and a space where visitors can work on their bicycles. On a Tuesday afternoon, a volunteer is helping a local tune up her pink cruiser. A white bicycle hangs high on the wall above a banner reading “97 white bicycles in the past 3 years – No more white bikes!”
Like many North American cities, Guadalajara is riding a wave of bicycle empowerment led mostly by grassroots activists pushing the city to live up to its plans and potential. That city bike lane plan, for instance, existed only on paper until the activist group Ciudad Para Todos (City for Everyone) forced the government’s hand by painting their own lanes. That embarrassed the city into announcing it would recognize any lane painted by citizens, and bring it up to code. Unfortunately, it hasn’t moved any faster on non-citizen-painted lanes, especially commuter routes.
Cyclists have also experimented with a sort of DIY, private bikeshare system, Bikla. Bikla was started by the street furniture design firm BKT when they couldn’t find anyone to buy their bike racks. Lack of bike parking on narrow, crowded sidewalks meant people didn’t take their bikes to shop and lack of cyclists meant businesses didn’t want to invest in racks. To get around this problem BKT developed a system that relied on a community network to host the bikes. Participating cafes and stores agreed to put a rack in front of their property. Riders could then go into the store, check out a bike, and leave it at the next station – with all the trips logged by hand.
Bikla created online bike route maps of the city, and put up riding distance markers at landmarks and plazas around town, letting people know how long it would take to reach their destination by bike. Bikla project director Mario Delgado said that helped shift the perception of cycling as a viable way of getting around. “People were shocked – they thought, ‘there’s no way that’s only 6 minutes away!’ And they started to try riding.”
Ultimately, this system proved too cumbersome and with too few stations to work and was closing down on the week I visited. Delgado hopes that – as in Washington, DC – the city or state will take over now that the concept has gathered interest and bring it to a workable scale.
He also points out that similarities between urban sprawl in Guadalajara and US cities are no coincidence. In the 1950s, Mexican cities began pushing development outward, fueled by heavily subsidized gasoline. “And the further north you go, the more the development patterns are the same.” Many of these communities contain nothing other than housing – no shops, schools, or community centers – and are poorly served by transit, leading to sky-high levels of drug use and pregnancy among teens bored out of their minds.
It feels like bike parties, ghost bikes, and the push for complete streets have bubbled up simultaneously in cities around the world, as the world heaves a collective sigh of frustration. Some of this is due to activists sharing their strategies and stories online in a newly connected world – bike advocates learning they’re not alone in their work any more than they are in their city. And it’s also the 1950s sprawl model, the fetish for the car, now showing all its cracks and flaws undeniably.
In less than a decade, Guadalajara has made an enormous turnaround. In a decade more, I’m hoping it will reclaim its old nickname of the forties, when it was known as the “pueblo bicicletero,” the cycling city.