COVID-19 Makes Cities Across the Globe Create More Bike Lanes (Quickly!)

City officials across the world have been rapidly expanding bike lanes and closing off roads to cars, encouraging urbanites to cycle in an attempt to maintain social distancing, avoid public transportation and limit the spread of COVID-19.

Berlin, London, Paris, New York and other cities across Europe and North America have been introducing pop-up cycle lanes during the pandemic, several of which are expected to become long-term changes. South America has also made major advancements: capital cities across the continent have been planning to expand bike networks for decades – but it was only the pandemic that pushed officials to focus on cycling as a sustainable transportation method.

“COVID has been a fundamental factor in achieving what nothing else could have – expanding bike lanes and network length by orders of magnitude instead of slowly and timidly as before,” says Carlos Pardo, senior manager at the New Urban Mobility Alliance in Washington, USA. “COVID made governments aware that it wasn’t a big risk to implement a system of bike lanes.”

“The use of public space for walking and cycling will not only be a key to reopening our economies,” adds Adriazola-Steil, deputy director for urban mobility at the World Resource Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, “but also to set the foundation to deal with climate change, improve air quality and reduce inequality.”