Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

M tele Pedal is a co-built initiative with cycling groups to promote the use of bicycles as daily transportation, aimed at potential and recurring cyclists in order to improve air quality in Colombia, by strengthening communication, management, and advocacy skills of cycling groups to help them impact the beginner audience and demand better public policies that promote better conditions (safety, infrastructure, among others) for cyclists. The initiative also brings mechanisms to encourage citizens to use bicycles as a daily means of transportation, such as the website www.metelepedal.com.co where cyclists can add and find useful information (key points in the city and events), online and offline challenges (mechanical workshops, educational circuits, bike rides, among others), and a social media campaign to break down the myths and barriers around the use of the bicycle on a daily basis and share information about the challenges and the website.

The first phase started in August 2020 after the contract with the Urban Movement Innovation Fund was signed off. We agreed to start in the middle of the lockdowns to strengthen the effects that they temporarily had on air quality due to less use of polluting transport. This phase had a duration of one year and currently, we are starting a second one to co-create and deliver a citizen agenda of the cyclist movement to decision-makers around environmental issues and mainly around air quality, mobility and urbanism.

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How Project Affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions:

The voices of indigenous communities and local actors in the fight against climate change and for the protection of the environment are invisible. Likewise, traditional environmental narratives only reach some sectors that are already convinced of the importance of the issue.

Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

We impact society with the gestation of a cycling movement to promote bicycles among citizens, which reduces polluting emissions. We deliver learning to local institutions around cities with cleaner and safer mobility. Therefore, one of the most significant positive impacts is environmental.
We also generate a high social impact by providing empowerment tools to potential cyclists through digital and face-to-face campaigns, providing information for their journeys, breaking down myths, and making visible key points on the route identified by themselves: https://bit.ly/2ZhYSAm. In addition, we train cycling leaders to promote their initiatives. We bring citizens and the public sector closer together, seeking that the community takes their demands to decision-makers and that public entities establish strategies to understand and incorporate said requests into their plans and policies.
Given the Latin American context at the social and economic level, women, youth and regular cyclists are the three large groups that the project tries to empower. In the case of women in Bogot , the gender approach is transversal to the initiative, half of the co-creators of the initiative are women. During the first phase we conducted two offline challenges focused on women cyclists, one of them was to raise awareness about the particularities of care mobility in daily commuting. Also, in an alliance with the Women's Secretariat of the Mayor's Office of this City, we created tools that provide security to women who decide to use bicycles as a principal transportation medium. Along with the last example, although the cycling movement in Bogota is diverse, it is mainly composed of young people who want to transform the social, environmental, economic and political reality through the bicycle and we seek to articulate them, train them in skills necessary for advocacy as the spokesperson, political shielding, strategic communication.
Paradoxically, cyclists in general are actors that contribute to the reduction of air pollution and are, together with pedestrians, those who are most affected by pollution in their travels. This places them in a situation of vulnerability to personal and road safety problems. That is why we want them to have more and better tools and skills to move around by bicycle and we seek to achieve a better air for them.

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