Sundays without cars

On a Sunday morning in Bogotá, the Avenida Séptima feels like a different street. The cars that crawl along it all week are gone, and in their place come cyclists in racing kit, families on rented bikes and a man pushing a baby buggy at a jog. A girl is learning to skate while her father holds both her hands. At a corner stall, a vendor named Rosa is pouring coffee for a queue that begins to form before seven. "On weekdays I sell to people who are in a hurry," she says. "On Sundays, they stop."

The scheme is called the Ciclovía, and it began in 1974. Every Sunday and on public holidays, from early morning until the middle of the afternoon, the city closes more than a hundred kilometres of its main roads to motor traffic. Well over a million people are said to use them on a typical day, which in a city of around eight million is a remarkable share. The idea has since been copied, in different forms, by cities from Guadalajara to Paris. At home, it is now so firmly part of local life that Bogotá is hard to imagine without it.

What makes it work is not only the space but the mix. In most big cities, leisure is divided by money: the wealthy have gyms and private clubs, while everyone else makes do with what is left over. On the Ciclovía, a banker on a carbon-fibre bike and a delivery rider on a battered second-hand one share the same lane. Along the route, the city runs free outdoor fitness classes, and in some parks hundreds of people follow an instructor in a mass aerobics lesson, many for the first time in months. "Nobody looks at what you are wearing," says one regular. "They look at whether you keep up."

It would be wrong, however, to present the Ciclovía as a cure-all. It lasts a few hours, once a week, and on the other six days the city still has serious problems with congestion, traffic accidents and air pollution. Some shopkeepers on the closed streets complain that Sunday trade is poorer than it was. Others point out that most of the route runs through the centre and the richer north, rather than the poorer districts on the edge of the city, where the benefits are needed most. Planners say they are extending the network, but progress is slow.

None of that dims the enthusiasm of the people on the road. By two o'clock, when the barriers begin to come down, the queue at Rosa's stall has become a line of tired, happy customers, many of them still holding their helmets. The cars return one by one, hooting politely at the stragglers. Rosa pours the last cup and counts her takings. "It is only one day," she says. "But on that day, the city belongs to us."