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Meet the ‘Bicycle Mayors’ Making Cities Around the World More Bike-Friendly
When Maren Ahlers started cycling around the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on her housemate’s yellow bicycle during the pandemic, she was just trying to avoid the cramped public transportation. But once she started inviting the handful of other cyclists she saw around for Sunday group rides, the idea quickly caught on, says Ahlers, who is originally from Germany: “Back then it was only three, four people. But now, sometimes there’s 70 of us.”
One thing led to another: Noticing that no other women were joining the group rides, Ahlers started offering free cycling classes for women in 2022, and invited all the cyclists she knew in the city to the first cohort’s graduation. When over 80 people showed up, she joined forces with half a dozen other cycling groups to bring the global cycling event Critical Mass to their city. Now, over a hundred women have learned to ride with another hundred on the waitlist, and Ahlers has founded Egre Menged Impact to support the growing community of cyclists — which counts well over 450 members in her organization alone — through community-based projects.
The current Ethiopian government is embracing green mobility, says Ahlers, and Addis Ababa is in the process of building 100 kilometers of new bike lanes. Credit: Maren Ahlers, Bicycle Mayor of Addis Ababa
But there’s a problem with being the trailblazer in your city — there aren’t many people to turn to for advice and support. That’s why Ahlers became the Bicycle Mayor of Addis Ababa, joining a network of over 150 cycling activists in 34 countries worldwide: “Egre Menged Impact is known for doing things locally, perhaps Africa-wide, but the network also expands our reach towards Europe and the U.S.”
The Bicycle Mayor Network was launched in 2016 by Amsterdam-based NGO BYCS (pronounced “bikes”), which supports grassroots cycling initiatives around the world. The Mayors, selected for their engagement with the local cycling community, serve as the face and voice of cycling in their cities and bridge the gap between communities and local governments. “It started with this desire of connecting people, giving them this authority to be able to advocate for sustainable mobility,” says Michela Chamonal, the network’s coordinator. “A lot of people want to do something, but very often they’re isolated or they don’t have the means to do it.”
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Replacing more car journeys with cycling has a wide range of benefits, including freeing up public space now occupied by cars, improving physical and mental health, and reducing traffic congestion, air pollution and emissions. According to one study, replacing one car trip per day with cycling decreases CO2 emissions from transport by 67 percent. Despite that, cycling makes up only one percent of all trips in the U.S. and five to 10 percent of all trips in Western Europe.
Sustainable transportation is not only about environmental impact, says Pete Dyson, a behavioral scientist at the University of Bath in the U.K. researching transport and travel behavior: “It simply means, meet the needs of now without compromising the needs of the future. There are aspects of safety and of culture that sit alongside all these environmental concerns as well.”
Replacing more car journeys with cycling has a wide range of benefits. Courtesy of Egre Menged Impact
The barriers preventing people from cycling more in cities are as diverse as the cities themselves, ranging from lacking infrastructure and safety concerns to environmental factors like air pollution and heat, as well as local culture and individual physical ability.
A network structure lets BYCS support the Bicycle Mayors’ work by creating a global community for them and providing know-how on matters like project proposals and applications for funding, while giving the Mayors the autonomy and flexibility to address the specific local issues, says Chamonal. Depending on the needs of their location, the Mayors might promote cycling culture, lobby for policy change, push for better infrastructure, offer classes and group rides for underserved groups like women and children, or whatever else is needed and feasible.
While they are not elected officials, the title was chosen with care. “Very often we are made of words,” says Chamonal. “If you present yourself with a name and this name is linked to something, it doesn’t really matter that the mayor is not a real mayor. It matters that you can present yourself in a certain way.”
Before Ahlers joined, there was a discussion about whether a white foreign national should be the bicycle mayor of Addis Ababa, she says. “I’ve been living here for six years, I have residency, I speak the language, so for me personally it didn’t feel weird,” says Ahlers. “But the question was, will the people accept you? I think this was the main problem.”
In the end, there was no other candidate, as the community was still small and she was the locally recognizable face of the movement. But as the movement grows, there are plans to hand off the title to a local cycling activist once Ahler’s two-year mandate is up.
“It’s an immense privilege and power to be bestowed with a title that cycling advocates and local authorities appear to, I would say, respect and take notice of,” says Dyson, who became the Bicycle Mayor of Bath in 2023 and has found the ability to share experiences with fellow Mayors invaluable.
“I wanted to feel like I was also not just a keyboard warrior, but also someone who could respond to active issues,” says Dyson. While he keeps his objective research work separate from his activism, “those two things nourish each other. Without seeing the hyper-local, it’s hard to take a good system view and vice versa.”
He’s been able to enact real change in his community, like pushing the city to resurface a dangerous stretch of road that many schoolchildren and university students use to cycle to class. But it’s not easy balancing this unpaid work with other obligations. “When appointed the title, I realized I had no team and no budget. It’s volunteering in the truest sense that you have to find our own way,” says Dyson.
Maren Ahlers is the Bicycle Mayor of Addis Ababa, part of a network of over 150 cycling activists in 34 countries worldwide. Courtesy of Egre Menged Impact
Chamonal agrees that this is one of the biggest hurdles faced by Bicycle Mayors: “But these are all extremely motivated people, so it’s astonishing sometimes how much they can do.” Convoluted bureaucracy and unresponsive local authorities can also impede their work, says Chamonal, though that is very location-specific. Both Dyson and Ahlers have been able to work closely with their city governments.
“For better or worse, I think my biggest impact is behind closed doors in advocacy and discussions with the local authority,” says Dyson, who previously worked at the U.K. Department for Transport as its first principal behavioral scientist. “I see my position as a critical friend, because our local authority has good intentions.”
Egre Menged Impact in Addis Ababa is also working closely with the government — it is currently offering cycling classes in a couple of public schools, is regularly invited to official events concerning mobility and transportations, and the city is open to its feedback about new cycling regulations, says Ahlers. “We’re trying to come from both sides, both advocacy on the government level and awareness creation in the community.”
Events like Critical Mass have been helpful in raising awareness about bike infrastructure and the growing cycling community, says Ahlers. Courtesy of Egre Menged Impact
The current Ethiopian government is embracing green mobility, says Ahlers, and Addis Ababa is in the process of building 100 kilometers of new bike lanes. Having an active cycling community in the city likely helped push this decision, says Ahlers: “If there wouldn’t be any cyclists, they would have not done it, probably.”
With a rapidly expanding infrastructure and a growing cycling community, the biggest challenge Ahlers sees ahead is behavior change — people are not yet used to the bicycle lanes, so cyclists often still use the road while pedestrians walk in the bicycle lanes, and many car drivers are against the infrastructural changes on principle. Events like Critical Mass have been helpful in raising awareness, says Ahlers: “Having mass rides with a lot of people, with music and lights and just making it a fun situation — we don’t want to approach it negatively.”
Going forward, Ahlers wants to focus on accessibility, both by training more people to ride safely and finding a way to make bicycles and bicycle parts easier to come by. “People call me daily: ‘Where can I buy a bicycle?’ And I can’t even tell them because there are no good bicycles around,” says Ahlers. “It would be awesome if we had either a cheap importer or a local manufacturer of bicycles and spare parts.”
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The big dream is to have a large community-based workshop, where people could get parts and learn how to maintain and repair their bikes, she says. Egre Menged Impact already started a small one in Ahlers’ home compound. “Most of the materials I imported from Germany — every time someone travels, they have to bring us stuff,” laughs Ahlers. “But we started it, we piloted it, and it’s so nice to see different people coming together, different occupations, different social statuses.”
“It can really sound bizarre to some people that bicycles can be such a center of life,” admits Chamonal. “But it’s astonishing to see the energy that people put into that, the motivation that they have, and how much they can do. Often people have great potential and they just need a connection to be able to do more.”
The post Meet the ‘Bicycle Mayors’ Making Cities Around the World More Bike-Friendly appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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