Some citizens in Guadalajara, Mexico have taken direct action to make positive physical changes on their streets. As part of a movement known as “Ciclovía Ciudadana”, or Citizen Cycleway, activists planned the designs and procured the equipment themselves to implement the necessary bicycle infrastructure they felt couldn’t wait longer.

Complete with well-marked bike lanes, intersection markings, signage, and even bike boxes, Guadalajarans may have one more accessible route to enjoy by bike without having to rely on unresponsive government officials.

Unfortunately, it’s just one front in a larger fight to keep their city sustainable and safe from motor traffic, much like the Freeway Revolt fought decades ago in our own city.

The video still hits close to home in San Francisco today, where a certain vital bike route has had its fair share of guerrilla activity and protests, reflective of the high demand constrained by dangerous conditions caused by poor design and motor vehicle traffic.

Definitely No to the Freeway! (La Via Express)

While the world has gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss again a shared approach to Climate Chaos, action is already being taken in countless communities. On a visit last week to Guadalajara, Mexico, more than a thousand miles west of the Climate Meeting, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city. Interestingly, this movement leans primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

This is the current situation along much of the line. Train tracks down the middle. High tension electric lines on the right, underground gas and oil pipelines under the left.

Ciudad Para Todos gained Guadalajara's attention with a months-long campout in the green space at the far end of this road to protest a bridge.

I met Étienne von Bertrab and Negro Soto Morfín, two of the main Ciudad Para Todos activists, at the World Car-Free Cities Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2008 and later they invited me to speak to the 2nd annual Congress of Urban Cycling in Mexico held in Guadalajara in September 2009. We got together just after Thanksgiving and they filled us in on the new campaign.

In June 2010, just before they left for York, England for this year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

Avenida Inglaterra is just above the red line crossing the image; it is currently a rail corridor with utility lines and limited open space on either side.

Étienne and Negro brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day and made two guerrilla video responses. At first the Jalisco government protested to Youtube and demanded the videos be taken down on the grounds of copyright violation (they had garnered 12,000 views in just the first four days), but when that news broke, even more people went to see the videos. (Youtube did take down the videos for a while, but restored them after protests from Ciudad Para Todos.) All three are posted here, but this is the one primarily in English:

The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos were circulating and galvanizing local opponents, but the neighbors had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. We met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she announced her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

One of the signs alongside the proposed route.

This is posted on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Alicia's shop, indicating the places where neighbors have already begun the transformation.

A short time later Étienne was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and Negro and their colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Etienne and Negro hadn’t anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting there has been a regular Saturday work party ever since. There are now over 400 new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days. The independent Hotel del Bosque sits on an adjacent corner. They were at first cool to the activism, but became an enthusiastic participant, including their recent support of a mural painted by some local graffiti artists.

This mural was just painted in the past couple of weeks on a wall facing the corridor.

A university campus is adjacent too, and students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses has gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are getting better every weekend.

Neighbors have begun implanting a linear park on their own.

Homemade signs adorn the newly minted unauthorized park.

This lovely garden has obviously been growing for much longer than the rest of the efforts nearby.

Neighbors and passersby already make use of the shady trees and park benches that locals have installed as part of their guerrilla park-making.

Picnicking and hanging out in the grassroots linear park.

On September 22, 2010, World Carfree Day, our intrepid activists decided to install a monument in the middle of the contested terrain. They acquired a junked car, and turned it into a large flower pot, fixing it in place at one of the busiest intersections on Avenida Inglaterra. On the morning they were going to put it in place, the first arrival was pondering how to move massive concrete pieces into place when a man drove by on a big backhoe, most serendipitously! He quickly agreed to use his machine to move two big slabs of nearby concrete across the railroad tracks and even suggested a better placement for them. Voila! A new monument was installed, and we had fun visiting it last Tuesday. Here’s a few shots of it, followed by a video showing its installation, including the arrival of a Critical Mass-like procession by the GDL en Bici crowd.

The yellow sign above indicates this car was a public art installation for Carfree Day, 2010.

Heavy cement was moved by a guy passing by serendipitously on a big backhoe!

Flowers Not Motors!

This back seat is a rest stop for bike and ped commuters crossing a long way from one side of the city to the other.

The down-to-earth politics of this new Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!” She’d been gardening across from her house for years, but now there are hundreds of neighbors doing the same up and down the rail line. The doctor is already scheming ways to deepen the new community’s life. She was planning to establish a free outdoor library near the benches that had already been built. “Take a book to read, leave one behind.”

Adriana and Dr. Alicia in the park.

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

The dead tree with living "leaves."

Leave the closet and let's be citizens all the time!

Thanks to Adriana Camarena, my compañera who fully participated in gathering this story, and without whom I wouldn’t have been able to write it!

Guadalajara, Mexico was host this month to the 2nd annual Congress of Cyclists in Mexico, a national gathering of bicyclist activists from around the country. I was invited to give a speech, which I somehow managed to do in Spanish (thanks to my media naranja for translating and coaching me!), detailing the history of cycling and Critical Mass in particular. I loved being at the Congress, meeting people from all over Mexico, a few old and new friends from the U.S., and one remarkable woman from Quito, Ecuador.

The city of Guadalajara is an ironic place for this conference. It is a town overrun with SUVs, streets jammed with cars, 6-lane, one-way boulevards, sprawling suburbs in five other municipalities making a metro area of 6 million or so. In spite of its obvious car-centrism, Guadalajara has a number of beautiful public plazas, several pedestrian-only zones closed to cars, both in its downtown and in a gentrified artsy-touristy neighborhood some distance from the city center. They've even installed a real European-style bike lane (or ciclovia as they're generally known in Spanish) on one of its major thoroughfares, with plans to extend a network of such lanes in several directions.

SUVs at an athletic club in Zapopan, a wealthier suburb of Guadalajara.

Six-lane roads all over, mostly jammed with SUV-heavy traffic. This is the norm in Guadalajara.

One of many pedestrian-friendly plazas in the center of Guadalajara.

I was surprised to find many streets closed to cars, full of pedestrians and shoppers.

The only ciclovia, or bike lane, in Guadaljara is on Federlismo... but it's a well-designed separate bikeway at the edge of the sidewalk, different pavement and plenty of room.

The same bike lane continuing towards a major intersection.

The Congress opened with several short speeches, a perfunctory welcome from the distracted mayor of Guadalajara (he left as fast as he could after his talk), and a much lengthier speech from the minister of culture. His talk was more informative and sounded very good, full of "new urbanism" concepts, favoring public transit (there is already a BRT system in part of the city), bike lanes, public spaces, denser and taller urban planning, etc. He explained that the city government could not provide the impetus for this agenda indefinitely, and in fact, that time may have already passed (far short of achieving any meaningful transformation of the city's transit priorities). He urged the audience, civil society in general, to take the lead and push for the changes it wants to see. An ecologist from the state of Jalisco, in which Guadalajara resides, spoke last and was quite adamant about how little had been achieved and how severe the impediments were.

Giving my speech in LARVA, opening morning of the Congress.

In fact, this was a common lament among the folks here (a couple of friends I made at the Car-free Cities Conference in Portland last summer made the effort to get me down here). The city is not only not advancing a sustainable transportation agenda, they are impeding it. Even if they were sincere in their efforts (which was not considered credible among most of the Congress participants) the common problem in Mexico is official corruption, where monies dedicated to any public infrastructure are often siphoned off into private pockets.

The Women's Panel on the 2nd day.

That said, the Congress itself was a great experience. Delegates from around Mexico showed up, representing such towns as Monterrey, Puebla, Mexico City, Queretero, Aguas Calientes, Ensenada, Xalapa, Tijuana, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi, and more. The CACITA folks from Oaxaca showed up in a biodiesel bus packed with a dozen amazing contraptions, all pedal-powered appliances and tools, and had fun demonstrating them during the Congress. Lots of women attended and participated in spirited panels and discussions. Generally the delegates were under 30, but there were a few of us older geezers too...

The bici lavandera, or pedal-powered clothes washer.

The CACITA folks were great stencil artists too!

The gathering reminded me a lot of the old days in San Francisco, before the Bike Coalition had become so large and "official," when a strange amalgamation of personalities were pulling and pushing to build new organizations, to find ways to get the ears of local politicians and planners, and to finally make bicycling an everyday transportation option... and there were some of us--then and now--who wanted to see bicycling as a starting point for a much deeper transformation of everyday life. Here in Guadalajara, all these types were present, the organizers and control-freaks, the plain-old freaks and hippies, the efficiency-obsessed, the techies and tour organizers, the revolutionaries and velorutionaries, the bicycle merchants, and the hopeful, youthful, idealistic, naive, savvy, and inspiring individuals who were ready to be part of something bigger. To be sure, a bicycling movement is growing in Mexico. Bicitekas of Mexico City has been going for 10 years, but in the rest of the country, cycling activism is in its formative years. At the Congress the well-rehearsed arguments made their appearance of course: helmets or not? Bike paths or vehicular integration or bike boulevards? Are we accommodating everyone or commuters? Short trips, long trips, or both?... and so on...

Not everything was focused on the nuts-and-bolts of cycle activism. A poetic contribution came across the sea with Oscar Patsi, blogger at La Revolucion de las Mariposas. He's a funny, unprepossessing guy, late 40s or so, speaking with a gravelly voice as he smoked his way through his presentation. He gives the bicycle credit for restoring his mental health and self-esteem after a darker period of his life. "I ride my bike and I know my city," he told us, and that he is the "finder" among his friends. When they want to have a bite, or procure an object, he knows exactly where it is because as a cyclist he has a much more developed sense of where things are.

Oscar Patsi, blogger at Revolucion of the Mariposas.

No todos los bragas son principes
No todas las braguitas son princesas
Pero los culos mas hermosos todos van en bicicleta!

(loosely translated)
Not all briefs are princes
Not all panties are princesses
But the most beautiful asses are always on bicycles!

The Sunday Streets of Guadalajara.... but it's EVERY Sunday, on major central city thoroughfares!

Via Recre-Activa crowds.

Guadalajara has a "Via Recre-Activa" every Sunday, closing 12 kilometers of major boulevards through the center of town from 8 to 2 for free open use (similarly Mexico City has a big Sunday bicycling scene). Guadalajara has also established a fleet of free public white bikes, or bicipublicas. By many measurements, the Mexicans are WAY ahead of San Francisco, from the dozens of public pedestrian streets and plazas that are heavily used, to the free public bikes and the Sunday street closures every week. (Partly it's that Mexican culture has not been as thoroughly subsumed by the modern atomized life that prevails in the U.S., so it's still part of the fabric of life to go out for walks, to enjoy shopping in pedestrian zones, etc.) That said, there's a long way to go here, just as there is an even longer way to go in San Francisco.

Bicipublicas, or public white bikes. They have a fleet parked around Guadaljara.

A spirited Critical Mass took over the streets on Satruday night. Guadalajara has a First Thursday Critical Mass normally, which has recently reached 4,500 riders!

One of the most inspiring examples I learned about at the Congress wasn't in Mexico but in Quito, Ecuador. While riding in a boisterous Critical Mass through Guadalajara on Saturday night, I found myself next to Heleana Zambonino, an intense and dedicated activist making her first trip out of Ecuador. We started talking (she had very good English, thank goodness, since my ability to converse in Spanish remains terribly limited) and before long she started telling me about her work in Quito with a group called Ciclopolis. A quick summary: starting about six years ago, inspired by the idea of Critical Mass that they'd gotten wind of, they started a "Ciclo Paseo" every Sunday from 9 to 3 over 29 km, that is now drawing as many as 50,000 people to a ride! They have an email list in Quito of over 40,000 people! There are four different social-public rides EVERY week! They do bike games on sidewalks one day, a night ride once a week, and much more... Even more impressive is that they got 70 km of ciclovias put on city streets. The city installed the bike lanes on sidewalks at first, but after their group organized protests, they got the city to rip out what they'd done and do it all over again!! Amazing!

Heleana from Quito, Jorge (Aguascalientes), me, Mariana (Mexico City), Jesus (Mexico City), and Bob (Ensenada and Oakland)

All this is to underscore how slow and unsatisfactory our progress here in San Francisco is. How can we be having 4 blocks of Valencia rebuilt without having proper Copenhagen-style bike lanes installed... after ALL THESE YEARS?? How many more times are we going to have to settle for tepid, unsafe, ill-maintained painted bike lanes in the car door zone? Leaving the U.S., even just across the border to Mexico, I'm reminded again of how little progress we've made, how car-centric we continue to be (against all common sense and planetary ecological concerns), and how much further along many parts of the world are, but almost entirely invisible to us!

On our way in to the Congress on the first morning, we came upon this bicycilng panadero (bread man), making his rounds. The bicycle continues to be an important vehicle for many kinds of workers.