From TheCityFix – ahead of Toronto and many other Western cities, it looks like Mumbai is now running a bike share program & car-free day. This from a city legendary for its automobile traffic problems — trucks are only allowed to enter the city at night so as to reduce the nigh-intractable daytime gridlock!
There’s no doubt about it: a bicycling culture is budding in Mumbai. All in the past month, TheCityFix Mumbai reported on the city’s first Car Free Day, which coincided with the city’s first “Cyclothon and a group of long-distance cyclists riding from Bangalore; and the new trend of evening cycling. Now, Mumbai has joined the growing group of cities around the world with bike-sharing systems. Two bicycle-sharing programs have just been launched in the northern part of the peninsula – Cycle Chalao and FreMo. Their stories are very different – the former was started by a group of students, the latter by a former financial CEO – but they’re both after the same goals: fighting climate change, improving mobility and making Mumbai a better place to live. (Link)
I celebrate the signs of a slow global change towards supporting alternate transportation, and, implicitly, questioning the logic of using massive, unwieldy vehicles to transport single occupants in cramped urban environments.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see that the cities I frequent are really struggling to get on the right track – Toronto’s proposed Bixi Bike Share program is teetering on the edge…
