Initial Position
Curitiba is well known in Brazil for being one of the top cycling friendly cities in the world.
Well, that was our starting point. But several researches that we made while we were focused on this topic revealed some quite interesting and different aspects of Curitiba.
Our city is famous for it's organization, infrastructures and urban planning and solution made in a "subdeveloped" country. Somehow our bicycle system managed to get a little bit famous also, what in the end showed to be not that true (something that our urban bikers always knew).
To understand mobility in Curitiba it's necessary to understand our context: where did we came from, and who the hell are we? Curitiba really started when groups from Poland and Ukraine came to Brazil, joined later by several other european nationalities (being one of the coldest city and the coldest capital of our country helped). That gives us a little bit different cultural background, being a little bit more organized and a little bit more reserved people than in other brazilian cities. A little bit, because the best answer for "who we are" is, in the end, brazilian.
And the whole brazilian mobility system was, since the beginning of the 20th century, heavily influenced by the north american system. Huge avenues, car based mobility and an inefficient or inexistent train system led us to poor public transportation combined with a huge area to cover for them - our cities grew to large proportions! As the common sense says that a big house and a car is the best thing you could ever have (hail the "american dream"), the mobility problem in the city arose in the the last years with great magnitude.
As we have several options for what to do with cars, and more specifically, how and where to park them, bicycles have never been the center of the attention here in Brazil, regarding to our politics and laws toward traffic, regarding to our people and cities toward mobility, and most important, regarding our culture.
In this context, we asked ourselves: how can a biker survive here, and how can they park their bike in this mobility chaos that Curitiba and all the other brazilian cities are compared to other cities?
Although our laws and codes consider it as a vehicle (even though not clearly enough), our culture don't. 70% of our bikers use it to go to work, but our 250 km of cycleways connects parks to other parks. We look at it as a sport and a leisure activity more than a way of transportation. And if we dare to defy this system, if we decide to ride our bike here we have to face all this lack of structure, safety and, most curiously, all the social barriers that walks together with this decision.
How do people really cycle in Curitiba? Which infrastructure is provided and how do people interact with it? What are the issues concerning safety and laws? How is the relationship between bicycles, cars and pedestrians? How our culture influences it and our decisions are influenced by it, and how society look up to this subject?
