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). In 2017, 682 alleged sexual crimes on the street or public thoroughfare were committed against women. 

The project sought to develop and encourage meaningful actions to raise awareness on the relevance of improving road safety conditions with a gender approach. The activities were 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 was 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 Gómez is from Bogotá, Colombia and is based in the US. She holds a degree in Political Science and has completed postgraduate studies in Public Management.  As a youth advocate, she has led various projects promoting road safety, sustainable mobility and public space use since 2018, and since 2022, she has worked with YOURS-Youth for Road Safety as a Capacity Development Manager.  "What inspires me to promote change is a strong belief that there are no small actions: every effort you can contribute is worth it."

Impact snapshots

• Empowered the cycling community through workshops, mapping activities, and an experiential route, successfully reaching nearly 400 participants and identifying key demands regarding personal safety and infrastructure.

• Developed a local cycling index to track the unique needs and experiences of cyclists, providing new evidence-based data to inform future public policy on sustainable mobility and gender equality.

• Secured concrete municipal commitments, including a specific infrastructure intervention to improve lighting and signage at a hazardous location identified during the project’s citizen mapping activity.

ABOUT THE LEAD ORGANISATION

despacio

Despacio is a Colombian research centre. Its objective is to promote a quality of 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, organising the home and work) to the most collective (planning and managing slow, humane, and sustainable cities). Despacio centres its work on three issues: city, life, and climate. The organisation pursues these three areas via publications, events, and a laboratory.