MEANINGFUL CYCLING ACTIONS WITH A GENDER APPROACH IN BOGOTA

BY Laura Daniela Gomez FROM COLOMBIA

Bogota has a strong cycling culture, an extensive network of 550 km of permanent cycle-infrastructure and almost 7% of the total trips in the city are made by bicycle. However, the city has many challenges to overcome in order to guarantee the safe use of the bicycle, especially among female cyclists.

Personal and road insecurity are constant challenges in the city. Between January and July 2021, the city had 42 deaths and 334 injuries, and 10,753 cases of stolen bicycles were reported (2020). While in 2017, 682 alleged sexual crimes on the street or public thoroughfare were committed against women.

The project seeks to develop and encourage meaningful actions to raise awareness on the relevance of improving road safety conditions with a gender approach. The activities will be designed to allow the empowerment, visibility, peer to peer engagement and incidence of female cyclists to advocate for safer and better conditions for them.

The goal of the project is to empower citizens of Bogota to take action and to raise awareness on safe cycling with special emphasis on the gender perspective.

ABOUT THE PROJECT LEAD

Daniela lives in Bogotá, Colombia. She is 27 years old and has a degree in Political Science and post graduate studies on Public Management. She works as a Project Manager in Despacio, promoting safer and more sustainable mobility.

Besides her job, she also works for her community and currently serves as a member of the Local and City Bicycle Board. What inspires her to promote change is the strong belief that there are no small actions; “all you can contribute to improve a certain situation is worth it. Knowing that working on road safety means you can save lives, that's very empowering.”

PROJECT UPDATES

on-site participatory mapping and other activities

This August, we had a conversation with one of our Local Actions winners, Laura Daniela Gómez, and some of her teammates to talk about the progress made around the implementation of her project. Together, Dani and her team talk about some of the activities they’ve successfully implemented to gather data around the situations female cyclists face in Bogota. They were also able to connect with decision makers and other stakeholders to discuss and take action around the data gathered. Dani was joined by Maryfely Rincón, Valeria Bernal, and Angie Ángel.

ABOUT THE LEAD ORGANISATION

despacio

Despacio is a colombian research center. It's objective is to promote a quality life in the cities during all the stages of the human life cycle, through applied research that challenges intuition. Its philosophy is similar to the Slow movement, which seeks to improve well-being from the most individual and familial aspects (eating, commuting, raising children, organizing the home and work) to the most collective (planning and managing slow, humane, and sustainable cities). Despacio centers its work on three issues: city, life, and climate. The organization pursues these three areas via publications, events, and a laboratory.