Bogotá, Colombia
By Andrés Jara-Moreno, Country Director, Colombia.

The act of rising again to life was witnessed by the members of Bogota´s Bicycle Round Table during the Third Edition of the City´s Bicycle Week in October 2010. The miracle occurred three days after they organized a funeral on Monday morning. Bicycle parking facilities, known as “Puntos de Encuentro or Meeting points”, were a living dead until that day. An underutilized infrastructure that in spite of have been inaugurated three years ago had not been put into service by the Municipality.

In 2007, the plan was to construct and operate ten of these bicycle facilities outside a number of the TransMilenio stations according to a study developed by the National University of Colombia. The bicycle “Meetings Points” included kiosks for public vendors and public rest rooms. The four initial “Meeting Points” required an investment of roughly 4,500,000,000 COP (about 2, 25 million USD).

The Bicycle Round Table of Bogota, with the support of ITDP, has been committed to this cause and thanks to the bicycling advocacy work done by its members over the last months, which includes the funeral aforementioned; the infrastructure that had been stuck in limbo has finally been given life. After additional media coverage, the current administration re-opened the public tender to run them and, for now, everyone is experiencing a feeling of justice when parking their bicycles there for free.