Ciclovía, Bogotá’s open streets program, is the oldest and most successful in the world. I went to find out how it lasted.

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BOGOTÁ, Colombia—At 4 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 15, Jerson Osorio stood at the center of several thousand traffic signs, speed bumps, and hip-high yellow cones. Walkie-talkie in hand, earpiece firmly in place, phone buzzing with voice messages, Osorio surveyed a fleet of 33 box trucks backing in around this cluster of roadway equipment. A hundred workers in parkas and ruanas began to load the trucks, each one bound for a different section of the Colombian capital.

“We build a new city every Sunday,” his colleague Katherin Amaya Roa shouted over the clatter. From 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday mornings, Bogotá draws more than 1.5 million people out into the streets to bike, walk, skate, and roll. Keeping 75 miles of asphalt free from cars for seven hours is the purpose of this weekly predawn hubbub, and every last item here has been meticulously ordered so that it can be dropped off, according to each intersection’s traffic pattern, from the back of an open truck.

The seven-hour respite from Bogotá’s notorious traffic and dirty air is called Ciclovía, and this chilly morning marked its 50^th birthday.  More than 400 cities have borrowed the idea, from Los Angeles to São Paolo to Addis Ababa. If you have ever walked on a car-free roadway in your city, you have walked in the long shadow of Bogotá’s Ciclovía.

Everyone who works on the event, whether closing the streets or selling snacks, describes it with the Spanish verb for getting up long before dawn, which sounds like what it feels like: madrugar. But there is joy in this ritual, too. Shivering beside Osorio for this occasion was the ebullient Lucy Barriga, who ran Ciclovía in the 1990s and established a similar event in Guadalajara, Mexico. “It always brings a lot of emotion to be back here,” she said. In Bogotá, she had hired a teenage Osorio as a volunteer; now he is the custodian of this proud local tradition. Osorio has not had a normal Sunday in 18 years. On a typical Ciclovía day, the team might have to track down an extra truck to set up the course, manage a road race, and reunite two lost kids with their parents. But the Ciclovía will happen, rain or shine: Bogotános are not sugar cubes.

There’s an idea Osorio heard from a Ciclovía researcher that has stuck in his mind on these Sundays apart from his family: “She mentioned that the people who go out alone to Ciclovía aren’t going to feel alone. Even if someone leaves home alone with their bike, they get to the street and they’ll find a lot of people doing the same thing.”

In the run-up to Ciclovía’s 50^th anniversary I had heard the event described in superlative terms, as a metamorphosis, a protest, a party, a jewel, and a miracle; as Bogotá’s gift to the world. Ciclovía as a balm for the lonely, but also a place to get some time to yourself in one of the world’s densest cities. A time to exercise or to see family; a cheap date or a long walk. Clarence Eckerson, a New York–based filmmaker who traveled to Bogotá in 2007 to shoot Ciclovía, wrote: “It is simply one of the most moving experiences I have had in my entire life.”

More concretely, the more I learned, the more it seemed Ciclovía was designed to solve all our present urban ills. Public health experts speak of its benefits to mental and physical well-being, a prescription for screen time, loneliness, and obesity. Planners believe it sets the stage for new ways of imagining the city, a bridge to the permanent design changes that have given Bogotá Latin America’s largest bike lane network. I heard that Ciclovía had rebuilt a sense of trust in a dangerous city, given women new access to the public realm, created a shared space between the city’s rich and poor neighborhoods, offered teenagers room to roam, and given locals a common sense of citizenship and belonging. Ask just about anyone in Bogotá where they learned to ride a bike, and the answer will be the same: Those sweet seven hours on Sunday morning.

Has so much pride ever been staked to something so ephemeral, something whose existence depends on the toys coming out of the box in the right order every week? Ciclovía nearly transcends the contested politics of mobility in South America’s fifth-largest city, luring nearly 1 in 5 residents to its open streets each week. It hasn’t had a dedicated opponent since 2008, when a Colombian congressman tried to shift the hours to assuage the impact on traffic. Defenders of Ciclovía dutifully marched downtown for a hearing, but many never had to testify: The lawmaker died at the dais on live television, as if struck down by a vengeful bicycle god.

Shortly after 5 a.m., as the sky turned orange, the last trucks pulled out of the lot and headed to the far corners of the city. Martin Sierra, a tall man in a jumpsuit, crammed the last signs into his truck. He has set up Ciclovía for 10 years, and he knew the system well; the signs and the cones and the speed bumps would come out one by one in reverse order until there remained just one thing in the truck: His own bicycle. He would build Ciclovía, and then he would go for a ride.

The event was, in a sense, inspired by the American city.

On Dec. 15, 1974, architect Jaime Ortiz Mariño and his friends organized a protest they called the Great Pedal Demonstration. They used connections at City Hall to close 80 blocks of the main avenues on Bogotá’s prosperous north side; 5,000 people participated. Ten months later, they organized another one.

Ortiz had recently returned from four years of study at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He described the experience as two educations in one: architectural training, but also exposure to the American counterculture, including the Civil Rights Movement. Ortiz participated in the 1967 march on the Pentagon and watched the Cuyahoga River catch fire. “That was very interesting for someone from Colombia, to find the American dream upside-down,” he told me.

He returned to a hometown that seemed to be developing under that same American planning influence whose reputation was curdling up north. Bogotá’s population was multiplying with Colombians fleeing violence or seeking opportunity. Malls were opening and rising car ownership was filling the streets with traffic. The trams had been ripped out and replaced with buses. Ortiz recalled: “People would say to me: ‘You went to study in the States and you came back talking about bicycles?’ ”

The original Ciclovía was an environmental protest against cars and against sprawl, and a demonstration of the power of the people. “Ciclovía was the biggest civic values classroom in the world,” Ortiz said. “Bogotá has this space on Sunday where there’s no police, no money, almost no politics, it’s an absolutely unique phenomenon.”

The city established Ciclovía as a public program in 1976. In 1982 it became a weekly event, and in 1995 it assumed most of its current form. Bogotá’s unorthodox mayor, Antanas Mockus—who rose to fame after mooning student protesters and deployed mimes to control traffic—viewed the activity as a gambit “to achieve self-regulation in the behavior among citizens.”

It is hard to comprehend now just how radical Ciclovía was in those years. Bogotá was one of the most dangerous cities in the world, with a murder rate that peaked in 1993 with 80 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants (New York City’s worst year was 14 per 100,000). Angelica Arenas, then a 22-year-old Ciclovía aerobics instructor, told the Chicago Tribune in 1998: “We want to develop good citizens. We also want to change the image the rest of the world has about Colombia. We’re not as bad as you think.”

In 1995, under Mockus deputy Gil Peñalosa, Ciclovía was reborn as a genuine citywide event. Peñalosa more than tripled the route’s length, opening streets in the city’s poorer southern and western neighborhoods. He hired Lucy Barriga, who incorporated exercise classes called Recreovia into the program, drawing out tens of thousands of women who hadn’t previously participated. Hundreds of young people were hired to work or volunteer at the event, including a teenage Jerson Osorio. The CPR-trained guardianos and guardianas wore red, and the program was called Bikewatch, in homage to the series Baywatch, then popular in Colombia. Suddenly, everyone wanted to work at Ciclovía.

Bogotá sits in a valley 8,600 feet up in the Andes Mountains. The eastern edge of the city hugs a steep green sierra; development has moved ravenously in the three other directions, across the flatland in the west and up into steep hills in the south, with informal settlements that cling precariously to the mountainsides. Violent crime has greatly diminished, but the sprawl and the lack of a sufficient public transit network have created some of the globe’s most hellish commutes: On the vaunted TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, commutes are so long and crowded that passengers sit on the floor, earning it the nicknames TransMiseria and TransmiLleno. Car ownership is still limited to the upper classes, but even drivers spend nearly an hour getting to work. Sidewalk conversations are drowned out by the grind of motorcycle engines, and a thick haze shrouds the valley and stings the throat.

During Ciclovía, however, Bogotá offers the clearest demonstration of the urban biker’s favorite aphorism: Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud. Particulate pollution levels on the biggest Ciclovía thoroughfares fall tenfold on Sunday mornings.

On Dec. 15, even before the guardians strung up the yellow Ciclovía-brand caution tape (25 rolls a week, a cheery alternative that ensures the streets do not look like one big police investigation), an army of cyclists converged on Patios, a lung-busting climb into the mountains. They came on Cervelos and Bianchis, but also fixies and heavy steel beaters. This uphill parade represents one side of Bogotá’s bike culture; on the Strava leaderboard for this ascent, Colombia’s Tour de France winner Egan Bernal is in fifth place.

To the south and west, away from the city’s richer areas, the Italian road bikes thinned out, but many people still cited the exercise as a top reason to hit the streets. There were teams of elementary school kids on roller blades and gangs of old ladies on beach cruisers. Ricardo Guzman, a carpenter who lives in a working-class area of the southwest, told me Ciclovía was the “the best thing that could be invented.” He rides 25 miles every Sunday. One 89-year-old rider told Agence France-Presse that Ciclovía was the thing keeping him alive.

As the morning went on, the character of the Ciclovía changed. Parents came out with their kids; teenagers popped wheelies. Couples strolled hand in hand, and friends walked and talked. Thousands of vendors lined the route, some under city-branded yellow and red awnings (these pay a small fee, and have insurance). Women surveyed griddles of arepas. A man was selling ice cream for dogs. The smoke of roasting corn hung in the sunlight. There were busy bike mechanics every few blocks, their hands black with grease.

At Parque de los Hippies, Angela Novoa Molina sells the fresh fruit concoction called salpicón, a family business she inherited from her father. She has woken up at 3 a.m. every Sunday for 26 years, and watched clients she met as children come to her stand with children of their own. The earnings helped her pay her way through college. “Ciclovía changed my life,” she said.

Nearly every Bogotáno has a memory of this experience. “It’s important not to forget that the Ciclovía is where we connect with childhood,” Juan Manuel Robledo, one of the organizers of the 50^th birthday festivities, explained. “In some way we all feel a bit like kids when we go out in Ciclovía.” The memories are stored not in the streets themselves, but in the way Bogotános move through them on a Sunday morning.

If the expansion of Ciclovía to link rich north and poor south was a test of civic comportment, it worked. “There’s no place in Colombia where you’ll find the richest people, the bosses of companies, with their minimum-wage workers and their families, all meeting as equals in Ciclovía,” said Peñalosa. “It happens, and it’s like magic.” The space was especially transformative for women. “Women did not feel safe going out in the streets,” observed Astrid Bibiana Rodríguez Cortés, who served as the Colombian minister of sports and wrote a book about Ciclovía. “Ciclovía allowed a level of appropriation of city streets. Groups of women skating, walking, enjoying themselves without the company of their fathers or brothers.” Today, Bogotá has at least three groups dedicated to women bike riders.

But for many people, Ciclovía isn’t about bicycles at all. It’s about the creation of a public space in a city that doesn’t have many. In the 1990s, televisions here played a promotional jingle: “Bogotá doesn’t have a beach, but it has Ciclovía.” For Paola Castañeda Londoño, a professor at the University of the Andes who invited me to a two-day conference for the Ciclovía 50^th anniversary, this phrase echoed the famous proclamation of the student revolts in Paris in May 1968: “Under the paving stones, the beach.” “When we say ‘under the pavement, the beach,’ we’re saying that the existing city always harbors the possibility of a transformation.”

The event carves paths through the metropolis that simply do not exist on other days of the week. In the middle of three-lane Carrera 50, in the city’s working-class western neighborhoods, Jorge Gonzalez sat in a wheelchair, drinking a salpicón. “For me, it’s a very enjoyable type of recreation, a weekend where I can go out and get around in a part of the city where, because of my condition, I can’t do during the week. The sidewalks are very complicated. So I take advantage of these moments to run the roadway, look around, people-watch.”

One way Ciclovía expanded its reach to non-bike-riders was with the exercise classes, which were introduced in the 1990s. “Lucy Barriga created this program for women specifically,” observed Olga Lucía Sarmiento, a public health researcher and leading scholar of Ciclovía. “Dancing, for us, is part of our life, especially for women. Women are less likely to bike, but more likely to dance.” During a 2011 Ciclovía, the city set the Guinness World Record for the largest aerobics class; more than 50,000 people participated. “That’s magical realism,” Sarmiento laughed. “The only way we can make sense of the absurdities of life.”

Colombia has long punched above its weight as a source of ideas for cities, a kind of urbanist breadbasket to the globe. TransMilenio was copied in cities across the developing world, even if it has fallen short at home. Medellin’s hillside settlements helped show the potential of gondolas as city infrastructure. The 15-minute city concept, which has replaced Agenda 21 as the right-wing city-planning conspiracy of the day, comes from the Franco-Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno. Bogotá’s previous mayor, Claudia López, pioneered the feminist urbanism of “care blocks,” public developments that offer services to women, including laundry and child care.

And then there is Ciclovía, whose 1990s expansion within the city coincided with a growing network of NGOs and philanthropies dedicated to sharing ideas between cities. In 2005, the Pan-American Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control held a seminar in Bogotá that led to the launch of the Network of Recreational Ciclovías of the Americas, with an annual meeting and a how-to manual. Gil Peñalosa became an international consultant, spreading the gospel of Ciclovía far and wide. “Traditionally portrayed as an urban dystopia and a city of fear during the early 1990s,” notes the urban planning professor Sergio Montero in his research on Ciclovía’s international appeal, “Bogotá became a world model of urban planning in less than a decade.”

In the United States, one decisive instrument was the 10-minute StreetFilms video that Clarence Eckerson made on his 2007 visit to Bogotá. This early viral video of urbanism directly motivated activists and city leaders in Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, and New York City to start their own open streets programs. It inspired the beginning of the “tactical urbanism” movement, which advocates for quick, temporary changes to cities, with or without government approval. Ciclovía had come full circle: An event inspired by the sprawl and dysfunction of American cities could now help heal them.

Seen from the United States, though, this 50^th anniversary celebration was a little bittersweet. After the wave of “open streets” programs that were introduced at the end of the 2000s, the movement has progressed in fits and starts. Streets that were dedicated to people during the pandemic have been reopened to traffic. The most regular programs are small-scale, while the most significant ones—like New York’s Summer Streets, which stretches for several miles—occur only a few times a year. The New York City Marathon, which many New Yorkers consider a treasured annual event, has 30 times fewer participants than a typical Bogotá Ciclovía. And of course, it occurs once a year; Ciclovía once a week.

The largest imitator in the United States is CicLAvia in Los Angeles, which closes different sections of streets around the city half a dozen times each year. It too was inspired by Bogotá’s Ciclovía, and by Eckerson’s film, said Aaron Paley, who helped found the Los Angeles edition. Paley traveled to Bogotá for this month’s conference and anniversary, where he marveled at the low-touch approach. Some intersections have just a sign in the road to keep the traffic out. The busier ones depend on volunteers.

It doesn’t work like that in the United States, where the threat of litigation, the related insurance costs, and the need to get the approval from an overtime-happy police department make open streets an expensive proposition. American cities like San Francisco and Chicago find themselves paying out the nose for one-off festivals, while Bogotá does this for a few million dollars all year long.

Bogotános, too, wonder if Ciclovía’s momentum has stalled. The network is still the world’s largest, but it is basically the same size it was 25 years ago. Some activists worry the city is not investing enough in programming and supervision, while threats to the Sunday tradition are lurking in rising car ownership rates and the increased allure of screen time. Participation remains just 30 percent female—better than the ratio of women on the city’s bike paths, but still disappointing for an event that has acquired sacred civic status.

Some argue that Ciclovía has made its mark on the city in the form of Bogotá’s bike boom, including protected lanes on several major thoroughfares. Bogotá now counts more than a million daily bicycle journeys, up from a couple hundred thousand two decades ago. That’s about as many as London, and more than Amsterdam and Copenhagen put together.

Still, the city’s 630 kilometers of bike lanes run on 13,500 kilometers of road. Biking in Bogotá Monday through Saturday remains a frightening experience, commonly undertaken with a bandana over one’s mouth, since the air quality is so poor. And in that sense, a 50^th birthday is a double-edged sword. A trophy for perseverance, but also an opportunity to reflect. If you dally as the clock approaches 2 p.m. on Sunday, you will see that Jerson Osorio’s team can unbuild a city as fast as they can build one. The vendors vanish, the motorcycles, cars, and buses return. By Monday it feels like Sunday was all a dream. Marcela Guerrero Casas, a Colombian organizer who helped start the open streets event in Cape Town, put it succinctly: “Why is it for 50 years we’ve been cycling on Sunday, and Monday we’re stuck in traffic?”

But there’s a strange power in the end of Ciclovía too. In that honking mess of a Monday morning lies the suggestion that building a city is not a linear progression from one thing into another, but a story of recurrence, going round like the wheel of a bicycle. The infrastructure is a routine just like the dog-walks and roller-blading sessions that follow, a weekly performance as certain as Mass or football. Another city is possible, right there on the pavement.