 Welcome everyone to this second advanced symposium for the California Bicycle Summit. It's the second of three. The next one in February is going to be led by local advocates who have had some amazing successes in their community. The one that happened last time, the first one was an amazing presentation by John Pooker and Ralph Bueller from their book, Cycling Cities. And one of the chapters in that book is the feature today. Two of the authors, Professors Carlos Pardo and Daniel Rodriguez are here to talk about what we can learn from what's going on in Latin America. But first I want to introduce a couple of folks who are behind the scenes. Kevin Claxton, hi Kevin. Hi all. The Development Associate, that's Stephanie Elfrato. She's our admin assistant. And if you have any technical questions, you can send them a chat. And Stephanie first and they'll try to help you out. Also here on our staff is Jen Guitard, our Development Director. Say hi, Jen. Hi. Hi everyone. Sorry, my camera wasn't working. And Cynthia Rose, our board chair will join us before the end. Before we jump into the advanced symposium though, I want to talk for a minute about the in-person summit coming up in April. The California Bicycle Summit is the favorite thing of ours that we do of mine. It's my favorite cowboy project. Every two years, we bring together hundreds of advocates, planners, officials, industry people to talk about what it's gonna take to win our agenda of making our communities more equitable, more prosperous, more healthy, more safe, more fun, more joyful through bicycling. And it's an amazing event. This year's event is gonna be in Oakland. I wanna talk a little bit about the venue and the content. The California Bicycle Summit is going to be held in Oakland, California. That is where our headquarters is located. So we have the opportunity to take advantage of our relationships with local businesses to make it a fantastic event. The venue is an interesting place. It's owned by Oak Stop. Oak Stop is a local event center, African-American owned business that has converted a bunch of gallery spaces to meeting spaces and owns also the California Ballroom, which you saw earlier, an amazing, beautiful event center for our plenaries. The reason I'm excited about it is of many reasons. It's in two separate spots. The ballroom is a block away from the event center. So we'll get to walk along the streets and to experience the improvements that Oakland is making for walking and bicycling. The owner of our space is very much a leader and an advocate for safe streets for biking and walking. And that's one of the reasons why we're thrilled to be working with them. Also, we're gonna have an opportunity to close the street in front of the venue. The venue has, as you saw, some amazing breakout rooms with very good acoustics and beautiful light, former art galleries, but it doesn't have a lobby. And you know how at conferences, some of the best things to do are to hang out in the lobby network with people. So we're gonna turn the street in front of the event center into a lobby. We're gonna close it off and enjoy the conviviality of each other on the street. That's thanks to Oakland Department of Transportation for supporting us on that. The event will have some fun social events. We'll have a movie night. Sure, we'll have a cocktail party. And then on Friday, we'll have a dance party, always a dance party per my insistence, but this one is gonna be associated with the bike party. Let me pause that for a second. The bike party is a monthly event, a social ride that goes through the streets of the East Bay and they are willing to go through Oakland on the Friday that will be there so that we can join them on their bike ride, which always includes at least three dance parties. They ride for a few miles, they stop, they dance, they jump back on their bikes. It's really gonna be a great event that way. Now to touch on the content a little bit, the theme of the event in Los Angeles was intersections. That the picture there is Tamika Butler, Komiya Gisei, and Ryan Russo of the Oakland Department of Transportation. They were speakers at that event. Ryan, of course, is gonna be there at this one. The theme this year is not going to be intersections. It's gonna be something we haven't decided yet. We have an amazing steering committee putting together the content. It's gonna be something along the lines of we're tired of waiting. It's taking too long to make our cities safe for bicycling and walking. What can we do to speed things up? It's just time to move. It's the climate crisis and everything else calls for speeding up the progress of change. We're gonna have some VIP presentations and we're gonna have some really cool grassroots presentations too. From, for example, the people who do the ride-outs all over the state. It's gonna be a super great event. The price is 425 bucks. The early bird price ended on November 30th. It was only 295. But for everyone who's here, you can register today. If you register today, you can get the $295 price. It's a special advanced symposium discount. So I hope you take advantage of that. It's definitely worth it. You can register for it at calbike.org slash summit. And so I hope you can come to that. And with that, I get to now introduce the speakers for the symposium. We have Daniel Rodriguez and Carlos Pardo who are the co-authors of the book about Latin America in the city cycling book. Daniel Rodriguez is the Chancellor Professor of City and Regional Planning and Interim Director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on active transportation, health and the environment. His co-author Carlos Pardo is currently a senior advisor to NUMO. He has worked on several projects focusing on topics such as bicycle strategies for cities, travel demand management and urban development. He founded Despacio, a Bogota-based sustainable transportation organization and was its executive director until joining NUMO. And he is the honored recipient of the Cycling Embassy of Denmark's 2018 Leadership Award. Speaking of Bogota, we are pleased to also have a couple of people from BC Activa, which is a radio station based in Bogota for and by cyclists. Lorena Romero is the BC Activa Foundation's director and project manager. She has been a bike activist in Columbia for more than eight years and she was at our summit in 2019, gave a very popular presentation. She is the creator of the Bicinema Project, which is an initiative to share movies in public spaces for urban communities in Bogota's disadvantaged neighborhoods, been nominated for several awards for community radio and won grants from their mayor's office to expand media reach and bike advocacy in the city. I'm looking forward to hearing her presentation, which is given with her colleague, Rafael Navarro, who is also from Bogota but currently based in the Netherlands, where he's working as a European reporter for BC Activa, sharing the Dutch cycling experience with folks throughout Latin America. He is an urban cyclist and a bike enthusiast, has worked for various bike advocacy groups in Bogota, including the Ciclo Readers, a reading and bike initiative. What an amazing and diverse group of presenters that we have. I am so grateful to you professors and Lorena and Rafael. Thank you so much. We're gonna have three presentations, probably last close to 40 minutes and then we'll have time for some discussion afterward. And so with that, why don't we start with Daniel, are you starting? Yes, Dave, thank you for that wonderful introduction and thanks to Cal Bike for organizing this second symposium. It's wonderful to be here today. So we divided our presentation with Carlos with me going with the first 10 minutes, giving you an overview of bicycling in Latin America. And this is part of that chapter that Dave mentioned. And then Carlos will be giving us a more up-to-date presentation of what's happened since COVID and a lot of the innovations that have taken place since. So it's great to be here. Thank you for having us. Why Latin America? So this was an interesting question that came up as we were talking with Ralph Bueller and John Pucker. In the previous, in the first edition of the city cycling book that now became cycling for sustainable cities, Latin America didn't have its own space. It was mentioned here and there. But Ralph and John were visionary to realize that Latin America had its own story to tell. It's one of the highest urbanized regions in the world, more than 90% of the population lives in cities. But at the same time, it also has significant income disparities and segregation problems. So there's both opportunities, challenges for this region of the world. And a mixed record of innovation. So some cities have been highly innovative. And you'll hear the case of Bogota specifically as a leader. And others have lagged behind. And it's not really only large cities. It's medium and small cities have been innovative and some have also been laggards. So I really encourage you to take a look at the chapter for more details. I'm going to just provide a couple of highlights that we think are important with edited and updated figures, but for more detail, you certainly can go to the chapter. Or frankly, if you want to email us or get in touch with us, we can also send you that chapter if interested. So here's the bottom line, I think. What has, how does, how did the change happen in Latin America? The change was in multiple, came from multiple directions. It came from the grass tops. So top down elected officials that had very strong ideas about how to diversify the mobility ecosystem and specifically encourage bicycling and walking sort of active transport, but also from the grassroots. There's been a very strong grassroots effort to push other modes of transportation, more sustainable modes of transportation and make sure that communities voices were represented in the transportation planning process. So funding has been critical. You'll see the change in infrastructure over time in various cities. There's also been a change, not only in the funding process, but also in how projects get prioritized. So bicycle projects compete hand in hand with a bus rapid transit and with street improvement projects. At the same time, and not by coincidence, demand management for automobiles became more prominent, specifically managing parking supply and the implementation of circulation controls basically constraints to using your vehicle during peak hours, depending on certain aspects of your license plate, the last number of your license plate odd or even for example. Integration with other modes, specifically for bicycles and public transportation has become more prominent. The building of separated infrastructure and then the snowballing effect, seeing that, wow, that city did that and it's becoming much more sustainable is having a lot of interesting attention and uptake from users. Let's do that too. So there's been kind of the leaders and then now the later adopters that are learning the lessons from those leaders and in some cases doing a very good job in implementing their bicycle programming, their policies and their infrastructure. So this figure here shows the share of trips by bicycle based on household travel surveys in the last decade. The book has a broader cross-section of cities. I did a selection here to make the graph a little easier and a little more current. But two cities stick out here in terms of mode share and this is actually for entire trips. So this is not for multimodal trips. Bogota has 8, I'm sorry, 6.6% here on the left in Guadalajara, the high bar on the right has 8.3% mode share. Guadalajara and Bogota no coincidence too also have the most ambitious Sunday streets or open streets programs in the Americas. More recently, other development backed surveys one that covers 11 cities has asked about the use of different travel modes to get to destinations including not only work but also school, errands and so on on a typical day. And they used bicycle as one of the legs in how people reported their trips. And from that survey, the numbers or the share of bicycle in any type of trip or in a leg of a trip increased to about 10%. The same was true of a couple of cities in Brazil. And in other parts of Latin America like Caracas or La Paz, Bolivia, the share even then when we're thinking about bicycles as a access or egress mode as a part of a more complex trip reached only 1%. So this is the type of diversity that I wanted to provide and show you across the various cities, not unlike what we see here in the US, not unlike what we see here in California. So how has this happened? So I think there's been leadership in terms of the provision of separated infrastructure, separated bicycle infrastructure, meaning separated from the main automobile lanes or the main motorized vehicle lanes. This figure here shows the supply of that infrastructure by city over time. And it's really two time periods that are very close to each other, 2015 and 2018. But you see significant changes, the difference between the green bar and the blue bar for cities like Bogota that increased 25%. And in fact, you'll hear from Carlos in a minute that Bogota's up to 550 kilometers. So it's already 10% higher than what it was in 2018. Adding percentage at this high level is challenging but they were able to add almost 30 more miles of separated bike lanes since. But other cities have done very well too. You see here Santiago and Buenos Aires are starting from slightly lower levels but they've been able to add significant infrastructure and Guadalajara again unsurprisingly shows the most dramatic gains during this time period. This is how Bogota's separated infrastructure looks like. This is one example of several types of infrastructure. This is an early example that attempted to fully take away the infrastructure from the side of the road and bring the bicyclists a little closer to the pedestrians. You see a prominent feature in Bogota that is now changing, which is this pedestrian and bicycle bridges to cross these busy streets. That is now changing as the city is embarking in a strategy to remove those and create great crossings for active transportation users and avoid kind of this circuitous route of having to go out of your way up and then again down. The infrastructure nowadays looks a little closer to this. This is kind of a classic type of slow street with the bicycle lanes on the right-hand side here with quite a significant amount of space for being able to traverse. Do you build it? Will it come? And so this is our kind of assessment in the book chapter of the association between how much separated bicycle infrastructure there is in each city and the percentage of trips by bicycle. So it's not a perfect correlation the size of the circles here denotes the population size of each city. But it does show us a positive trend which is what we would expect. In fact, this correlation is about 0.35. So the cities that have a quite significant amount of infrastructure are seeing a higher percentage of trips by bicycle with some outliers above the graph like the Guadalajara's of the world and some other areas, particularly larger cities like Lima, Sao Paulo and Mexico City under the curve that have significant infrastructure but not quite a high modal share for bicycle. The last point I wanna make before passing it on to Pardo is that policies, programming and promotion have been critical to the success of bicycle mobility in these cities. This is based on a survey that we conducted for our book chapter. So it's a small N anywhere between 20 and 24 cities but we were interested in trying to find out how our cities managing some practical issues around policies, promotions and programming. And what we found was that design guidelines were fairly common. So around 70% of those cities that we surveyed had bicycle design guidelines. About 80% of them here in the second pie chart have cycling supportive policies, promotional campaigns promotion is big. So more than 95% of all of those that we surveyed had bicycle promotion. And then on the right hand side, you see that the presence of a specific department responsible for implementing cycling projects is not as common. So about 55% of cities that responded to our survey said that they had a separate department. The other ones had this under existing departments, perhaps public works, perhaps a transportation department, perhaps another unit within the municipality in charge of cycling projects. And with that, I want to pass it on to Pardo to talk more about recent developments since COVID. Thanks, Daniel, and thanks for this opportunity. I'm going to race through a few things in Borota. Of course, we could talk forever about all these things. And what we time, of course, is asking us to be brief. I just wanted to start with a shout out to Chris Morfus' take on how it is to cycle in Borota, because I firmly believe that we need a lot of people from overseas telling us about how they see things so that we can improve. So I'm pasting the link there. Chris, I think, is in the audience, so happy to have him here. I'm going to give a presentation, which I'll also share the link to in case you want to steal any of my pictures. Please do. I'll give you a link to steal them from my flicker, because you can't take them from Creative Commons. So I'm going to zoom in to Borota, because I'm here, because a lot of interesting things have been happening, and it's because sort of the place where I have the nicer pictures as well. So apart from everything else that Daniel was presenting and how we can start to understand the impact of COVID and how people were reacting to from government, first of all, I want to take a step back and think about a very, very large amount of actions that were done. This is from a paper that we wrote predominantly TopCom that I was supporting that effort with a large database that you can also access when clicking on that link that you see below. That's why I'm also giving you the link to my presentation, where we were reviewing many different things. And you can see that the biggest amount of responses and actions were in terms of the street space for pedestrians on bicycles. So Borota was one of those places which was doing a lot. They did do, apart from the 550 kilometers of bikeways, they also did 84 kilometers of temporary bikeways, which are no permanent. I'm not very good at miles, so surely somebody in the chat will tell us how much 550 kilometers is, those two 350 miles, I think, and the 80 kilometers or something like 60 miles, maybe a little bit less. There was a lot of work on it. It was incredibly decisive. It was literally from one day to the next that they iterated during three days. And then they kept this. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a few slides. The picture on the right is the example of how they did it at the beginning, which was basically just segregating with whatever they had in store. And then on the left, you see how it looks like today. It's more permanent and more fixed devices, but not fully civil works, which would be a longer process. But it is incredible that this city was able to build a great amount of segregated infrastructure in such a short time. And I feel that I'm very proud of my city and my government who have done this, but we're fighting the good fight now, which I'll also describe a little bit better. I think one thing that is fundamental to understand and why Bogota was so quick in doing this is that we have 123 kilometers of bikeways, which is something around 80 miles of temporary ciclovia on Sunday, which makes it pretty easy for the government to actually activate this from one day to the next. Because this is exactly what they do on Sundays. They expand the infrastructure for people walking, cycling, dogging, or whatever by means of very, very light infrastructure of temporary devices. And then they just create a new network. Because this happens every Sunday since 1974. It was not really difficult to say, let's do this starting tomorrow, literally, because they knew where it was, they knew exactly how the operation had to do. It was basically a matter of how to do this, preserving the safety and reducing the risk of contagion for people on the street, basically, who are operating out. There's two things which I think are also really important to understand. I lost a graph which was showing actually the same trend globally. But in Bogota, there was a very, very big issue around bicycle theft. The numbers are incredibly high. Last year, we hadn't finished the year, and we had almost 10,000 bicycles having been stolen. And this is despite the incredibly effective work that the Secretary of Security has been doing in getting the thieves, because there's a mafia of thieves of bicycles. They are incredibly well-organized, as it happens with many mafias in the country. So it is horrifying. It is very sad. It makes fewer people ride a bike. And if it weren't for that, I think we would have tons more cyclists. At this point, the last OD survey that we had was around 6% of trips were by bike. Last year, they did an estimate, very tropical estimate, let's say. And they arrived at 13% of trips were being done during the pandemic by bicycle, for several reasons. Scared of public transport, not having a car, new infrastructures, and that increased to beyond twice. But the sentence of describing what that 13% is is a little bit long to say. Actually, John Pucker and Ralph Pirla were presenting this in one of their recent articles talking about how there was COVID work in effect in transportation. So I think safety theft are huge issues. I fail to remember where there is one number on the amount of thefts that have been done globally, but it is something that has really hurt me. A second thing is that we are seeing by-clash, which is this term that is normally used for. Whenever you have a lot of bikeways or bicycle infrastructure being built, it is the reaction from people who are riding a car and who don't really understand physics and the size of a car. The size of a person in a bicycle. So we see this, the person on the right is a journalist saying, what do you think about this lane taken away from cars? Which of course I responded, it's not being taken away. It's being replaced by twice as much lanes. So that is one thing, one of the left is a quasi-journalist saying, absurd bikeways. It's a very poorly argumented article, which I'm sure you've seen a lot of in California and beyond. And then of course, one of the major newspapers, cars versus bicycles, which I'm sure all of you have seen in your different cities. I've pasted links to all this in the slides in case you want to see. And I think I'm closing with this, which is sort of more prospective. How, what do people say? This is a very non-representative sample. This is more like a snowball sampling based on email lists from a shared bicycle provider. So it's definitely skewed, biased, everything towards people who ride a bike. But in any event, I think having said that, it's interesting to see how those people are responding to three questions. So this was a survey done in, or rather sort of a question sent in November, 2020, where we asked them, what were you using in March, 2020? And how that were distributed? Then we asked the same people, what are you using in November? Still lockdown, but not really a stringent lockdown. And then you can see a lot of people teleworking, but a sizable proportion of people still using active transport. And then we told them, what would you do? What do you predict you'll do when we are in a post-vaccine world? Having asked that in November, 2020, without knowing when that world is, I think we don't yet know what that post-vaccine world is in this. And then you can see sort of how the proportion of trips that they are saying will be preserved and active transport is pretty high. Public transport is the mode that suffers the most and telework seems to be preserved. I think that telework thing is going to be higher than that. And I think that individual motorized transport is much higher than what you see here. So I think that's my presentation, I don't remember. Just to finalize in the seconds that I have left, I just wanted to promote the link to my pictures because you can actually go to anywhere, anywhere in the world except Russia and some other places and sort of click through and for cycling advocates, you can click through to the cycling 1,200 pictures that I have somewhere on download, whatever picture you want, use it for wherever you want, as long as it's nonprofit use. And just tell me when you used it so that I'm very happy when people use my pictures, just please do. Yeah, so that's it. Thanks very much. And Carlos, it's so bad you're here, why don't you just, I'm sorry. Yeah, no one, just take over Carlos, sorry. I think it's now either Lorena or Rafael, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Rafael, help me. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing the presentation. Thanks, Dave and your team. Thank you for the bike. It's a pleasure to me and my team to be in this place. Let's start how, why and for whom we work on this active foundation. This active radio and the cinema are the programs of our NGO. This active radio, the first one, our work brings closer the institutional offer with the cyclists who write and work in our city Bogotá. We make collective foundations and activists in some series know the government and we bring the closer the police policymakers and the decision makers by letting the cyclists know the institutional offer available for them. We are the radio made by and for cyclists. We are a media of communication that says we can all be cyclists and even in a city like Bogotá really chaotic, we can be equal and we can all enjoy this year. In Colombia, in a special and Bogotá, the cyclists need information and this active radio provides it. We are a grassroots, a collective and many of ours have different day jobs. Most of us did not have a communication diploma but we have become reporters by trade. We produce our stories because we found out that there was a need in a city for creating for cyclists and bicyclists bring it to gap between institutional offer and the citizens and springing knowledge of all typical topics related by biking has been basically our main goal. Our community radio and our NGO shows that we all can be cyclists and we all can be reporters of what is happening in our series. A network of reporters and activists passionate for biking is the backbone of our organization. We would love to have more international reporters. We are rough away with the previous one, please. You are welcome to become a part of Bisectiva. Bisectiva's goal is to tell the news that cyclists need to throw the eyes of the community. And we do throw our network of reporters to the community. And we do throw our network of reporters in different areas of Bogota, in different cities of Colombia and in different cities of the world, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador and Europe. Bisectiva was born as a citizen movement participating in the community bike consults in Bogota. We will continue as a citizen initiative carrying of the cycling community interest. The mainstream media does not fulfill that role of telling the stories we as a cycling community care for and need to know. We step up a feeling that God is trying to get our community. We did not invent community radio or screening movies in a public spaces, but what our do is to share the info cyclists need to care for. That is our added value and something that has helped us distinguish in our job. After more than five years to work, we have a strong network of institutional alliances with help us know the information in the local administrations that are important for our community. When we facilitate the information, we facilitate the biking. The information is the power. As the sign goes, the broadcast alerts, discounts, recommend routes, business ventures, activities and many other topics that are important for riders in Bogota and in Colombia. Next. In terms of safety, this is a real problem in our city. 26 bikes are stolen per day. 8,200 so far in this year. Initiatives and activities from institutions are important, but more important for us is that people that know them. Initiatives like bike registration, bike parking offered, infrastructure, technology solutions and some others provide solutions to this issue. Also, we help communicate to the policymakers about the net and concerts of urban sites. We lay bridges between the government and the ever-growing cyclist community in Bogota and Latin America. This work has been recognized by national and international organizations. We have won several distinctions, public grants and sponsorships. We have helped us to fulfill our role. We have participated in three national bike forums in Peru, Mexico and Ecuador. Cal bike sponsors as to participate in the California bicycle summit 2019. We thank you for your support. Next profile, please. 2020 was a very challenging year for our NGO. It was a very challenging year for our community. During the crisis, we were growing as a team making more alliances with universities and community broadcasters. Since most of the activists were unnegotiable to meet because of the corona restriction, we had a lot of contact during the different periods. One of the ideas that appeared was B-Cinema as a way to reappropriate it and re-significate public spaces via the projection of movies of the biker and not biking community. Next, please. This is a project about a safe environment to share cinema and bike with friends and family. We project movies on public spaces, mostly walls, and we invite all bike community to join for a cool tour and networking as a passer-by. Like some experts say about the induced demand with a strong culture the demand for friendly spaces and bike oriented policy will be greater. Our foundation in association with some local government officers has made safety campaigns giving helmets to workers and messengers with some socio-economic difficulties that provides safety and their chain to continuous bike usage. These are our objectives to be a community communication media-free, willing networks having a scope with marginal communities breaking city divisions linking Bogota with the region and other cities. Next. We have very successful campaigns to raise our awareness for the safety of cyclists in Bogota not only in terms of crime but also in terms of road violence. One for them was to us cyclists to publish the pictures of their friends and relatives with the hashtag someone waits for me at home and we have a loved one who waits for us at home and sharing two pictures helped to put a face into the cycling community. Next please. Our next stop of the campaign was a pain in the mural with the hashtag in a critical area of the city and invited local authorities to take a look at the building of the mural and the campaign with printed pictures of the people who waited for us at home. Via these initiatives the cycling community raised awareness about issues that are important for us on the local government of Bogota. We are not only community radio we care for our communities. Finally in terms of culture and activists in Colombia versus USA. In Colombia we grow the bike in our environment and we are very close to us owning a car is a aspiration but it is not functional in today's series versus the USA the bike is a sport element or like a toy because the long distance are the reason we need to have a car and some series are car centric. Bogota is very wide series but the usage of the bike is way spread. Bogota has seen several decades a lot of activities of bike offers like segregated bike lanes around the world. The activist at San Francisco is a reference of the world and in my opinion it is very different from the one that occurs in Bogota. We have some groups and initiatives but they don't always work together. However all the efforts of us are valuable to the series to help us become the world capital of the bicycle that we all dream so much. We hope to visit as soon I'm Lerena Romero who is the director and if you have any questions we will be happy to answer and then we will help from Rafael who will help to translate them. Thank you so very much. All of you give great presentations and we will be happy to answer as soon as we can. Now we have about 30 minutes for a conversation. I encourage you to put a question in the question and answer box and we will do our best to direct them to the panelists and get them all answered. I will start with a question from John who is working in American cities that are working to prevent bike theft to help people keep their bikes. I raised my hand but I'm not sure if we are doing it through hands raised. Did I go? I think there is one question. The thefts are because the person actually takes a knife or a gun and you are being mugged. Another third of them is because you haven't been careful in leaving your bike. Your lock is not properly put. The other third is you are confused. Somebody is telling you I love your bike. Let me get a ride on your bike. Will they take it from you? You are being conned. That is an important portion of the answer to understand how bicycles are stolen. It is important to understand the amount of thefts where the bicycles go. Following the bicycles is important. It has been done in several places in the world. That is a good first step to understand how to act. A bicycle registration system is something that can work as long as the complete registration is done. It is something that is linked together between owners of the bikes, bicycle shops, a community that communicates what is happening with the bicycles. A bicycle registration may be a good thing. Educating users towards having good bike locks. What is a good bike lock? How to take your lock and how to put it together. Front tires are very well locked to a bike parking. Not to the rest of the bike. It is a standard mistake in leaving your bike lock. Education goes a long way. That is what I think is important. In terms of specific examples, it is important to find great examples of effective reduction in theft. Lorraine, have you had a bicycle stolen? How have you prevented from getting your bike stolen? I think Lorraine is having connection issues. I will try to chip in while she solves that. In my case, I never had a bicycle stolen. The trick is to lock it and lock it again until you feel safe. That is pretty much what we do with BC Activa. As Carlos said, we try to raise awareness of things like proper locking of the bikes and to share initiatives that could help to curb the bike theft in the city. Nevertheless, some people try to come up with initiatives. Some technological initiatives. Devices that can tell if someone is next to your bike. We try to break the lock. As part of that, nothing is perfect. There is still a long way to go. We have tried to raise awareness of urban cyclists about bike registration in the city. That is far from perfect. We have tried to raise awareness of urban cyclists. We think it is a step in the right direction. Do you have anything to add? A very deep question. You might say a good question for each of you. I will ask every one of you to answer this question. It is a two-part question. What is your greatest hope for bicycle in Latin America? What is your greatest fear over the next 10 years? Great hope and greatest fear. I will jump on this one. At the risk of being too general, I think it is true that there is this general tendency to be losing transit ridership. If I were to guess, the loss in ridership is about 1% per year. Some places are losing and others are a little slower. That is the basis for both my greatest hope and my greatest fear. My greatest fear is that those trips that are leaving public transportation are going into the automobile and into motorcycles. That will mean as a result more pressure to prioritize auto-centric transportation policies. I think it is true. Unfortunately, we will come to the detriment of bicycling. That clearly is my major fear. Part of showing the media, the intense debate in the media, what we see here in the US and California about taking lanes from automobiles, even if they are totally underutilized, or even better when they are very utilized. That is where the demand is going to be. The converse is my greatest hope is that those riders will move into a bicycle and that we will be attracting many more users. I am particularly keen about women. They are overall underrepresented. In the case of Bogota, there is about a 3-to-1 ratio from men to women in terms of bicycle use. We definitely want to attract BRT users. I think it would be parochial to want to keep transit users in transit if they want to move to a mode that is more satisfying to them. That means physical activity means being outdoors. By all means, let's have them move to the bicycle. And then non-travelers. There are many people that would want to be on a bicycle and be on a bicycle. They want to be on a bicycle. They want to be on a bicycle and safer from traffic. They can get to another city. The way I did it in the C-Clovia that Parlo identified in the 1970s that opened the city to me and allowed me to develop this love for cities thanks to a bicycle and to the policies that allowed me to get around. That would be my greatest hope. I am going to say Carlos, my main fear is that the electric vehicle craze takes over to the extent that people just start thinking that an e-motor bike is an e-bike and they go on the bikeway because it will be once their cost is reduced and they will go directly there rather than a bicycle. That is maybe a very elaborate fear of something that may happen in the medium-term in Latin America. But what I see is that the lack of proper regulation and enforcement of some vehicles, which are either an e-motor bike or a two-stroke, horrifyingly dangerous engine retrofitted onto bicycles is a huge problem in many places. It has happened in Chile for a long time, their GDP increased and they started buying motorbikes. The bicycle is a stepping stone towards other modes which may not be sustainable is a big fear despite the fact that I do love e-bikes but those which are sort of the lower classes. Speed, not high speed, those that are assisted, that kind of thing. I think it's conceptual, elaborate, long-term fear and sort of a related one is theft and deaths in traffic because of a high uptick in cycling without corresponding action in the city governments. I've worked in several cities in Latin America and one thing that happens when governments are promoting cycling but just in sort of what they say but not really action in the ground is that some people end up being run over because cars are just going too fast and there's examples of cities which have stagnated growth of bicycles very high risk of riding a bike which makes them not a nice place to ride a bike and I won't say names but there's several cities in Latin America that have that so I think that is sort of another fear and then I guess hopes, the hope is that people start using the bicycle more that the bicycle is actually a science significant budget for infrastructure programming management and the entire bureaucracy of a bicycle policy that's what I think is an important thing that's fears and hopes I'm happy to if somebody else try Go ahead Lorena and Rafael Dave, I'm so sorry I will answer this question in Spanish and translate it please fears and hopes are hard to express in a different language I understand Well for me my biggest dream is that cities are designed for women I think the issue of women is very relevant and makes the difference in that cities are much more friendly for everyone Well, for Lorena her greatest hope is that cities are planned for women to take women into account the gender topic is very very important we need to make sure that there is a city for everyone including women And well it seems to me that in a city like Bogota it is very important it is relevant and decisive the issue of security I'm really worried nothing has happened to me personally thanks to the universe but I'm worried that people can't go out riding bicycles and also that they steal it I think it is too serious since there are thefts it is very serious but killing a person seems very serious and suddenly I don't know if there is a magic formula for that to happen at least in a city like Bogota but I think it is very very worrying for Lorena one of her greatest concerns is bike theft but not only because someone can take your bike is because someone can harm you and that's a big concern because the main problem with that is several things among others that can hamper people to use the bike but also that can create an environment that will prevent people from using the bike and deriving some other problems so there is no magic formula to solve that but she hopes that we can find a proper way to improve in that field James Celis asks a good question about how much the bicycle advocacy community in Latin America is using the climate crisis as a rationale for increasing the emphasis on bicycling I can add to the question that in my experience here in California the folks who are concerned about the climate crisis and good advocates on it don't consider bicycling an important enough solution they're into electrification of everything and not into changing mode share one of our priorities in the coming years is to get bicycling included as an important piece of the solution to the climate crisis what's going on in Latin America in that regard so I guess I mean first of all yes the Glasgow stuff and all the discussions around cycling and cycling being included and everything thanks to this cycling lobby I think is a wonderful president it's the first time that I see that that happens despite having tried many times but specifically to this question in the context of Latin America people are being killed in the street either because their bicycles are being stolen or because they're being run over by a truck so that has been sort of top of mind always every time that you talk to people and you ask them what would you like let's stop killing people on bicycles so the climate crisis despite people knowing that it is important I haven't really seen sort of a big narrative arc around this sort of as an argument to say let's let's help cycling be promoted and probably it's because of what I just said it's because of the huge concern around safety and security and theft and death sort of closer and then more personally I think that the climate crisis is fundamental but it is psychologically difficult for people to to actually act based on it because their home is not being flooded so the lack of proximity to the consequences of climate crisis makes it difficult to use it as an argument to promote something so I don't feel the promoting cycling because it is a solution to the climate crisis it would get us anywhere but I'm very cynical that's sort of my take on that I wanted to add one more thing that is of interest and Pardo I have this similar reaction in your response to Jim Salas's question so it's not that surprising given kind of the time dimension that it is in the collective minds climate change versus the immediacy of the crashes Chris Morph has posted that there's one fatality per week in bicycle fatality per week in Bogota but the one area that is a little surprising to me and I would love to hear from my co-panelist that isn't on the agenda more from bicyclists is air quality specifically in Bogota some cyclists use masks pre-pandemic to filter out particles and those masks in that 40 minute average trip length would become black with suit with black carbon in particular matter with the level of background concentrations that we have in many of our Latin American cities it is not out of the question to wonder whether it's actually bad for your health to bicycle period and so the opponents of bicyclists say well yeah get off your bike and I'm surprised that it hasn't become more of a call for action to clean the air so that everyone could be outdoors enjoying the environment healthily as opposed to risking their health I wonder whether you have suggestions or ideas about this John asked whether a health promotion has been a big incentive and it sounds like it hasn't I'm going to switch to a recreational question Bruce Dougie asked how popular is trail cycling and mountain biking in South America South America is a big place but what can you tell us about the popularity of that kind of bicycling I just have a quick thing on this I'm trying to do a map which I'm not very successful at to sort of look at the altitude of the place where they were born and the successes of the different cyclists have been very good at different stages of either the Tour de France Giro and Volta Espana because my hypothesis is if they were born or have lived for a significant amount of time in a place which has a high altitude they have done well not just because of the red globules and whatever in their blood but just because of the history and the culture that is a comment just to try and answer the question there are different places especially if you go in the mountains like through the Andes where cycling is a big thing for road cycling and mountain biking the quality is huge on mountain biking Columbia is huge on road cycling from then on you can find some other people which have been sort of significantly using the bike but I think those two countries are big the riders in sports have been big in sports but it hasn't been super documented but happy to hear from others as well Lorena, you want to add something? Thanks Leigh I would like to tell you that in Bogota and in Columbia in general not only the mountain cycle but it is also very representative and it is inside the culture and the day to day people really generate a lot of community around the mountain cycle there are super big groups very consolidated not only in Bogota and its surroundings which is where you can practice in the surroundings of Bogota but also in Columbia there are groups with a strong community there is a group called Parceros which generates a huge community and I think that really there is a big difference between countries like Columbia and others from Latin America and even others from the United States that community is so big that it is generated through the mountain cycle I think that if it is very close to us in our culture it generates community and also people like cyclists like Egan Bernal started in the mountain cycle the town is gathered competitions like these in the mountain cycle even great champions like Egan great for the Colombian case particularly in Bogota there are huge communities centered around mountain biking and we are talking about communities or groups that ride together and can amaze although Lorena can tell numbers I will step in to say we have seen numbers of bike cyclists that are like 100, 150 or more that go out as a single group on a Sunday or something like that coming back to what Lorena said some famous cyclists like Egan Bernal started his career as a mountain biking cyclist so for Lorena the main difference would be that in or one of the particular characteristics of mountain biking in Colombia around in Bogota and around the city which are the mountains that we could use to ride our mountain bikes is that it creates a big community these communities are very tight together and that creates a very strong movement so yes mountain biking in Colombia is very important is quite popular and you're all welcome to try it it's awesome to ride the mountains of Colombia in a mountain bike I have a question about Ciclovillas I was just in Los Angeles on Sunday for what was a fantastic event so beloved by the community people come from all over the region to ride their bikes this was on Martin Luther King in South LA they close about a six mile section of the roadway and that's it in Mexico City they close about a 35 mile section roadway every single Sunday you do it two or three times a year maybe a little more at its peak in Los Angeles every single Sunday in Mexico City and I know Bogota has one I believe every single Sunday what can you tell us about the importance of those events in Latin American cities and what can we should we try to emulate what they're doing there and do them every single Sunday I don't know if there's specific data to point to increase in Ciclovilla there was once this discussion where we arrived at something that we called the Monday Hangover because you have two million people going out on Sunday and then all of a sudden you have 300,000 going on a Monday so what happened where did you go but I know that Daniel is working on this beautiful project on health and transport which maybe he has specific yeah thanks Carlos so the work of our colleague Olga Lucia Sarmiento at Universidad Los Andes to quantify the physical activity for example and how much time is spent in the Ciclovilla and Bogota has been wonderful in highlighting the multiple contributions of the Ciclovilla so from what you say Dave absolutely right opening the city to all the users and I think kind of desegregating what is a fairly segregated city so that people can visit parts of the city that they don't go to normally and interact with people that might not see on a daily basis is a great contribution in addition to the physical activity benefits and the outdoor benefits in a city like many Latin America that don't have a lot of public spaces that don't have a lot of green spaces what made the Ciclovilla and Bogota and in Guadalajara and other places particularly effective was not only the space and the policies around the space but also the programming so increasingly there are community events around physical activity around yoga around aerobics even art sort of public art that brings the community together so it is kind of morphing from rolling exclusively to a place where people come together and express community and in that way it has really become very powerful now it's owned by the city by the population they lament the weekends there's a couple of weekends a year where it doesn't happen for logistics and holiday reasons but there's kind of a lamentation of like wow not today not today Sunday this is a bummer I wanted to go out today so I would push towards sort of thinking about adoption in fact has been quite innovative in terms of its ability to overcome some of the constraints that has limited the implementation of Ciclovillas in the US one of them is having to pay overtime for police in order to close streets it becomes a significant expense in the US so being innovative about how to deal with closing those spaces and I think COVID might have been a great catalyst for that is a great opportunity something maybe or Rafael um yeah we would like to share like the vision from a grassroots movement and although of course it's very important to quantify the real effects of someone that is dearly beloved to all in our city but for us as a grassroots movement Ciclovilla is a big facilitator because it gives us a place to gather together every Sunday and it gives us an excuse also it provides access to the city as Daniel just said in a very segregated city which has with sometimes lacks a lot of different spaces for leisure and which sometimes could be quite frantic frantic or very stressful it's incredible to have almost the whole street for you or you feel that the street is only for you and in my particular case that was incredible when I was learning how to ride my bike and one of the most beautiful things that I see on the Ciclovilla it's parents with their kids teaching them how to ride their bikes although there can be some problems our and we were discussing this with Lorena a bit so for us in Bise Activa we would like to invite other countries to try to emulate this model of course we have to take into account paying their dues to police and other things but what Ciclovilla did for people is to expand their access and it's a great excuse to start riding your bike lots of us why do we love Ciclovilla or some of us is just because we rode our first bike and we took off for the first time our training wheels in Ciclovilla and that's something that several of us and I think other fellow people from Bogota can relate you don't forget that you don't forget that experience we're going to wrap up here pretty soon that's a beautiful comment Lorena it is the city's soul I want to give the panelists a last chance to get a point across that you feel is really important for us I don't know follow me on Twitter I'm taking a break but I guess I can tell you more there Dave I love the opportunity to learn from the south you know too often the information fads trends policies flow north to south and it's wonderful to learn from the successes of places that have been by necessity had to be more innovative and have already taken shortcuts to do things that are great and that we can certainly implement in our California city so thank you for this opportunity well thank you very much for the invitation and thank you very much for creating these really valuable spaces because it helps us to generate community and I think that's definitely the most valuable thing we can do for the bike and for the communities that we have in our well Lorena just said thank you so much Dave for the invitation and thank you so much Cal Bike what you did is very very important because you need communities and bring communities together and that's one of the most important things that we can do to promote and to encourage people to ride their bike so thank you very much she says and see you in April see you in April but the takeaway message is if anybody can can ride a bike also anybody can become a reporter and an advocate for biking and that's our invitation here at BC Activa we are a small community media but we like to invite any of you who are interested to report just contact us and we will find a way to to spread the message across because we can all be cyclists but we can all be reporters about biking so again as Lorena said thank you very much for this wonderful invitation well it's gracious of you to thank us because really we're just doing this for our own benefit like Daniel said we know that we have a lot to learn from the South I think for reasons I don't have to go into too many establishment bike advocates look to Northern Europe for solutions and we know better than that we know that we can learn from all over the world especially from Latin America so you're helping us thank you we'll see you in April we're glad that you're coming with that I want to remind folks that you can get a discount for the summit by registering today using the discount code that Kevin just pasted into the chat and I'm going to throw in one more sweetener to the deal and that is you can get this book if you register today we'll send you a free copy of Cycling for Sustainable Cities this is the book that John Puker and Ralph Guler did there's a chapter on cycling in Latin America in this book it is like a an encyclopedia really for bike advocates I would give it to your city planner as proof that this can be done so with that I want to thank our team Stephanie and Kevin behind the scenes and thank you all for joining us and one last thank you to the panelists thank you all very much really really I appreciate it