Dan,
My first ciclovía, I didn’t realize it was ciclovía. I just knew the streets stopped being streets.
You hear it before you see it, but not in the way you’re thinking. It’s quieter, calmer. No horns. No bike motors. None of the intrusive elephant groans of trucks wildly too large and heavy for the roads they’re on. No, the city’s soundscape actually softens. It breathes. And in that breath are friendly voices, playful barks, the patter of runners, a distant stereo drifting behind a cyclist who coasted by, whispering wind of swaying trees.
My first ciclovía, I was walking with family as we turned a corner and arrived. The scale of it really hit me. Streets typically packed with buses, end-to-end cars, and bikes threading gaps that barely qualified as gaps — none of that was there. The street was filled with bodies instead of machines.
Not for a street fair or a race day, though similar in scale. Just the city deciding, collectively, that for half a day a week, its streets belong to its people. Over 120km of its streets, in fact. Streets that, on a Monday would make you late, surrender every Sunday to people moving at the speed of pleasure.
That first ciclovía, I watched a man lay his head in a grassy median between two major roads, close his eyes, and take deep breaths of the fresh breeze coming off the hills. I watched him as we walked, not because it was strange to see a person resting, but because it was unusual to see a person so certain he was allowed to.
At the next block we hit a convergence — another artery of ciclovía crossing ours. The people filled this intersection however they pleased. A blind man on the corner sang the classics over backup tracks from a speaker at his feet. Tents lined part of the street, some filled with people hanging out, others with vendors selling. Beyond them, picnics spread into the green zones. Slackliners played between trees. To the side, a guy swung from the overpass on aerial silks, spinning above traffic that wasn’t there.
Every Sunday, this city takes its barely sufficient infrastructure and transforms it into excess. Streets that spend six days not being enough become more than enough on the seventh. A sabbath not in scripture but in asphalt — the city keeping a commandment it wrote for itself.
Think about what it takes for a city to commit to this every week — plus holidays — not as an annual festival or a pilot, but as a covenant with itself. There’s a trust in that. A bet that if you create the space, life will fill it in a way that’s worth more than the “efficiency” you lost.
A city infamous for its traffic forfeits a tenth of its roads, and driving actually gets better. It creates more room by offering more room. Most cities I’ve lived in would never take that bet. They’d optimize for throughput instead of asking what the throughput is for.
Sunday after Sunday, I’ve returned to ciclovía. I’m slowly breaking a stride that doesn’t serve me here, seduced by streets that serve something softer - a surrender of structure to stage space for something I’d stopped making room for.
Every Sunday, Bogotá makes room by opening its streets and lets its people remind each other what they’re for.
Dan Muirhead spent 15+ years paid to make people pay attention. Now he is more interested in what is worth paying attention to. Based in Bogotá, with roots in Dallas and frequent time in Miami, he writes Bogotá Letters and profiles makers to document how cities are used versus designed, and how objects are made to be lived with. More at danmuirhead.co.