ARTICLE FROM THE BOOK:
Cyclists & Cycling Around the World – Creating Liveable
andBikeableCities
Cyclists& Cycling
Aroundthe World
Edited by Juan Carlos Dextre, Mike Hughes & Lotte Bech
Published by Fondo Editorial, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013
ISBN: 978-612-4146-55-8

Quality of Life and Bicycles - How Curitiba
has become one of the world’s most
liveable cities
By Fábio Duarte, professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica doParaná, in Curitiba, Brazil

Some data: urbanisation and quality of life
Latin American cities are one of the best places to enquire about the relationship between
quality of life and urban spaces, as 82% of the population live in cities. South America
has an urban population of 83%, the same rate as North America, and exceeds Europe,with 73%. East Asia, with highly urbanised cities such as Tokyo and Hong Kong, had only
reached an urban population of 50% in 2010 (UN, 2011). However, more than the final
rate, it is the rapid urbanisation that challenges the quality of life in the cities.
Measuring the quality of life in this context is a huge challenge. Direct and causal relations
between family and per capita income and quality of life have been investigated byother methods, which include more flexible concepts, such as happiness – even thoughhappiness may vary enormously from culture to culture (Graham, 2008).
Gallup Institute (Gallup, 2007) has shown that after urban insecurity, the presenceof gangs and the quality of public transportation are the most important criteria
influencing the degree of satisfaction with the city. On a global scale, after Sub-SaharanAfrica, it is in Latin America, with 41%, where most people are dissatisfied with publictransportation.
While the quality of public transportation is unsatisfactory, private motorisation increases.
The Clean Air Institute (2011, item 4) argues that “it is possible that some Latin Americancountries may reach [the US] level of car ownership at the current projected rate of increase”.
By 2030, the annual growth rate of car ownership in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Dominican93Republic and Ecuador will exceed 3% (Dargay; Gately; Sommer, 2007), doubling the annual
population growth rate, which has been 1.2% for the last decade, (UN, 2011).
The increase of motorisation has short- (deaths and injuries, stress) and long-term effects(pollution, respiratory diseases), which are negative for the collective quality of life.
A coherent public policy should stimulate the use of public transportation and, mostimportantly, non-motorised vehicles, such as bicycles.
In order to understand the links between urban mobility, the use of public space, andquality of life, the city of Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, may be a good example. The
city has gambled on creating a vast bicycle network in order to improve the quality oflife of its population. It started this ongoing approach in the 1980s, when most of SouthAmerican cities had virtually no concern with bicycles. In this chapter, I would like toshow you how innovative this approach was. Despite some big challenges the city is still
keen on embracing bicycles again as an important transport mode, both technically andpolitically - it is still a good case study for Latin American cities.

Buses, pedestrians and bicycles: towards a friendly urban mobility
In the 1970s, Curitiba decided to face the mess of uncontrolled bus operators whowere the only alternative to increasing private motorisation. The basic idea was tostructure urban growth along mass transportation axes; and the highest population
densities would be allowed only along these axes. The logic was putting people wheretransportation infrastructure is. After several studies, the municipality has chosen to use
buses as the modal for mass transportation.
Bus corridors and dedicated lanes, trunk-and-feeder network of bus lines, integrated
fares for the different lines, physical integration at terminals, and pre-paid fares to speed
the boarding procedures became what is now known as BRT – bus rapid transit. Thissystem has been adapted and implemented in different cities around the world. In thebeginning of 2000, Bogotá, a major Latin American city, brought many innovations tothis system and showed that BRT can carry as many passengers as a light rail system.
Transmilenio, Bogotá`s BRT, has become the new benchmark, and in recent years Curitiba
has adapted some of its innovations.
Nevertheless, there is one aspect of Curitiba`s BRT that remains remarkable: how to keep
the pedestrian scale even along mass transportation corridors, and even when it carries
more than 2 million passengers per day.

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Cyclists & Cycling Around the World

Figure 1: Bicycle network map. Source: JPPUC 201395

Instead of putting BRT in the middle of wide avenues, where all traffic – buses and fast
car lanes – are bundled together, Curitiba has decided to split the traffic in three different
roads. The peripheral roads, with three traffic lanes and no parking, are for fast traffic (upto 60km/h), with semaphoric crossings each 100 meters to 150 meters apart. The central
road is divided into three parts: in the centre are the two BRT lanes, one in each direction– sometimes a third lane only for overtaking buses; this central corridor is flanked, in eachdirection, by a narrow walking passage, a parking lane, and one or two slow traffic lanes.
This scheme keeps the pedestrian scale. When crossing the corridor, pedestrians feel
more comfortable with the slow traffic and know there is a walking passage to guarantee
their safety before crossing the other segment.
Along all BRT axes a special land use zoning enforces the presence of commercial andservice businesses in the basement of residential buildings. This compulsory mixed use
environment keeps the street alive all day long.
In the 1980s, Curitiba started another range of improvements towards friendly urban
mobility. The city created the first bicycle path in the country, in a workers’ neighbourhood.
Today, the city has the longest bicycle network in the country, with more than 100
kilometers of bike lanes and bike paths and another 200 km have been planed to beadded as shown in figure 1.
In this chapter I would like to highlight some qualitative aspects of this network. In the1980s, when Curitiba started the implementation of its bicycle network, the very idea ofconsidering a bike as a vehicle was a bit awkward. The first bike paths in Curitiba shared
the sidewalk space with pedestrians. This model is still used in some bike paths underconstruction. But in the 1980s and 1990s the city was trying to find some alternativemodels to expand its bicycle network. And here comes a clever idea: if bikes are more
flexible than motorised vehicles, why should its planning always follow the road pattern?
The municipality then found two forgotten urban spaces: free areas along railroads andalong urban rivers.
In Brazil, railroads are under federal administration. For safety reasons, along the railroads,
a10 - 30-meter wide strip must be left unoccupied. Historically an important center forrail transportation in the south of the country, Curitiba still has more than 30 kilometersof railroads crossing some densely urbanised areas.

96Cyclists & Cycling Around the World

Figures 2 and 3:
The municipality is
remodeling its BRT
corridors, and is
implementing bike lanes
along some of them,and installing bike racks
near by the so calledtube stations.

If, on the one hand, all the land along the railroads must be kept unoccupied for safety
reasons, on the other hand, this area remains as an empty space in the very core of thecity. The municipality decided to use this unoccupied area to build bicycle paths, whichreach some cities in the metropolitan area.

Figure 4 and 5: In the 1980s Curitiba launched its bike routes
project. Today the bike routes network has 120km. In its firstphase, the municipality implemented the bike paths in areas
with no other possible use, for example, as along the railways.

97

Figures 6 and 7: In the 1980s the city
implemented its most used bike paths
network along urban rivers, linking themunicipal parks.

Also in the 1980s and 1990s, the city started creating several parks. Known as a rainy
and cold city (by Brazilian weather standards), Curitiba did not have many public spaces
and only one central park. The municipality then started creating parks, from a botanicalgarden to thematic parks dedicated to the major immigrant population which formed
the ethnic background of the city, such as the Polish and the Ukrainian parks. More thana leisure facility, all these parks have as a primary function to control floods, in areascommonly affected by the flooding of the dozens of rivers which crisscross the city.
During some decades, as in different parts of the country, the public administration
decided to channel and to pave these rivers.
In this context two clever ideas were put in place. Firstly, almost as a symbolic gesture that
this approach to the urban rivers ought to change, some parts of Curitiba’s main river, called
Belém, were kept open and a bike path was built along it.
This bike path links some of the main parks of the city. The underlying logic of it is that,as most of these parks were created to control floods, rivers should be considered partof the urban structure. The municipality built some other bike paths even over canalised
rivers; and created a bicycle network linking the recently built parks. With this approach,the municipality tried to create a friendly city, where a family could bike together to visit
the parks using a safe bicycle network.

98Cyclists & Cycling Around the World

Contemporary challenges and general considerations
The first decade of this century must be seen as a dark period for bicycles in Curitiba: anabandoned bicycle network, virtually no new bikes path created, no general bike planissued. Over the same period, Curitiba became the most motorised city in the country,with almost one vehicle for every two inhabitants. Something had to be done. And it was.
Different groups of users started pressing society to see the bicycle as a valuable formof transport, and pressed the municipality to reconsider the bicycle in its General Plan,issued in 2004. Under such social pressure, some new projects have been implemented.
The first of them was the creation of a cycling circuit in the downtown area; the problem
is that it was opened only on Sundays, and leads to nowhere – despite the presenceof many cultural facilities nearby. Symbolic of the poor quality of this project, the newmunicipal administration abandoned it in the beginning of its term, in 2013. The second
is the implementation of the first bike lane along the BRT corridor and bike racks in almost
every bus terminal, in order to facilitate the integration between buses and bikes, andimprove the quality of public transportation. By the end of 2012, the city implemented abike share system, which has been discontinued 6 months later for a broad revision. Andfor the first metro line, in the project stage, all stations will have a bike park.
In 2013, a new municipal government took place. In his inauguration day, the new Mayorrode on bicycle to the City Hall. Nine months later, the Municipality presented the main
guidelines of its plans to enhance the modal partition of bicycles in the city.

Figures 8 and 9: The bike share system99

In four years, around 40 million dollars should be invested in bicycle infrastructure in thecity, for remodeling the exist 100km of bike paths, and add other 200km; implementing
bike parks in all bus terminals, and bike racks in all parks; and implementing micro bikenetworks in the industrial district. (The proposed bike network, see Appendix)
It is true that the example of Curitiba, a city with 1.8 million inhabitants, is atypical byLatin American standards. In Brazil, only 6% of the cities are over 100,000 inhabitants; and4% in Argentina and Bolivia, according to the respective governments. However, if a cityof 1.8 million inhabitants has done it, a smaller city also can do it.
Fábio Duarte
duarte.fabio@pucpr.brPhoto credit
The pictures are the authors, 2012 except where it is stated otherwise100