Curitiba’s Plan for Creating a Cycle-Friendly City

The city of Curitiba announced the details of Plan Cicloviário on September 6th. The big news, however, is not the $90 million investment to implement hundreds of kilometres of new bike roads in the capital by 2016. Nor is it the creation of designated routes for bikes on 7th Avenue, a major artery of the city centre. And it’s not the design of a ‘cycling microgrid’ in the Industrial City of Curitiba, to benefit workers who use the bicycle as a means of transport. The real news is the plan itself, and all that it represents. Curitiba now has a bicycle plan, announced as a “package”. In the political world, something tends to only make ‘package status’ when it is an emergency and it is critical. One hears “package” for Economy, Education, Health and Public Safety. But now the bike has also earned a package of 12 measures, ranging from infrastructure deployment to the creation of a ‘cycling plaza.’  Hopefully, it will be enough to drag the concept of multi-modality into the mainstream of city planning in Curitiba.

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