Bikes vs Cars

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Last week, a bike protest tried to cross the bridge.

They were stopped and could not proceed...

And then on the next day...

It was one policeman per activist, right?

Rafael made a video. I think it is on the "Bike È Legal"-blog.

William, you contacted the transport secretary

about the bike lane at Paulista, right?

I sent an email, and got no reply, as always.

In 2008, I moved here to study.

I planned to bring my car.

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There was a lot of traffic and I was scared to drive.

I took the bus the first six months. It was very expensive.

One day, I rode my bike to the university.

I didn't know anyone in town.

I did it on my own.

It was really scary.

But I arrived at school active,

with a clear mind, happier,

more energetic and full of adrenalin.

Whoo!

This made me do that again and again.

One day, I was a bike rider in São Paulo.

Today, I have a lot of friends, a true family here.

We are trying to understand what is happening to our city.

What influences the mayor's decision

in building cycle paths or a bridge for cars?

Why is public transportation expensive even though it's so bad?

Who makes the choice? What's the criterion?

Who funds this? What are their motives?

I think this is the key problem of every city.

I love bicycles and I hate to drive,

so I really shouldn't be living in LA.

I want to be on my bike or walking as much as possible,

and I've pretty much constructed my life so that I can ride my bike often.

Do you want to go downstairs, kid, are you ready?

Are your shoes on the wrong feet again? Yes.

- Are you ready? - You didn't pack any snacks?

- Daddy, what you doing? - I haven't packed any snacks, no.

- Come on. - No, I'm scared.

- It's too hard to walk down the steps. - 'Cause your shoes are on the wrong feet.

Sit right there while I open the garage, okay?

It's time to open the garage!

Let's go!

End of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century,

about 20% of people in LA commuted by bike.

People didn't get in their car and drive two hours the way they do to work now.

People worked in their communities.

It was a different Los Angeles then.

All around LA in the 1900s people were riding bicycles.

If you can just imagine 20% fewer cars on the street,

I mean, that alone is like an idea that makes you happy.

So when you're doing exploration in Los Angeles,

you don't want to walk into people's backyards too much.

That could get dangerous. Someone could shoot you.

There used to be a bicycle freeway that ran through here.

Do you know anything about that?

The slab that's still there, I know that's it's city-owned.

- Cool. - Mika, come here.

- Well, thank you. - You're welcome.

It was probably seven or eight years ago

that I saw this iconic picture of these cyclists coming down

from Pasadena on this wooden boardwalk.

It was hard to believe.

My first thought was, where was that? Is it still there?

Why is it gone? Who tore it down?

What I often do is I'll look between the houses,

because the cycleway would've been behind all these houses here.

When you see that picture,

you can't help but wonder what it would be like

if every freeway in Los Angeles was a bicycle freeway

instead of a car freeway.

Welcome to Cars and Coffee Irvine.

If you're a car-lover, this is kind of Mecca for us.

What you see here is almost a hundred years' worth

of automotive history sitting in this parking lot.

If you don't understand this, you don't understand automobiles.

The guys who drive these cars

dream a little bit about being that race car driver.

They know they're not, but it makes them feel like they have that in them.

It makes them feel like they could be,

that they are driving the same car that some guy drove at Le Mans,

or drove on Sunday at a racetrack.

"I could drive like him. And I want to be him."

And it makes you feel better about yourself. It just does.

- Look at you, Mr. Man! - I know. Right?

Beautiful.

- That was great, thank you. - Yes, that was a treat.

Do I want to have cleaner air for my kids?

Do I not want climate change?

Yeah, you're dang right.

And I think, you know, these things are facing us right now.

And I would say that everybody in this parking lot,

even though we all love gasoline

and we all want our gas-powered cars, at the same time, we want cleaner air,

and we don't want the climate to be changing

as dramatically as it is right now, and that's a scary thing for us.

So these people want to do something too.

What you'll find is, at the end of the day,

we're all fighting the war on oil.

Right? We're addicted to it. We want it and we love it.

And it's really fun and it's part of who we are.

You got a hundred years of history sitting here in this parking lot.

You don't want to walk away from that, I don't want to.

I'm not selling my gasoline car, and I'm as green as they come.

My name is Raquel Rolnik. I am an urban planner,

professor for urban planning

in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism

of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

And I just hate to drive.

- Watch it! -

Whoops. Didn't see it at all.

Oh, I'm a very bad driver, I can tell you.

But there is no public transportation option for me

to come every day to the university.

Sometimes when you are driving, especially in traffic jam,

they say, "Okay, I am going to leave this car here right now

in the middle of this street and I'm going to walk.

I'm going to leave and I want this car to disappear."

And I know that this feeling, a lot of people have this feeling.

But it's impossible. How can you leave your car in the middle of the street?

What's going to happen? So it's impossible, so I would...

I wish I had a car that could disappear overnight.

If the car industry makes something like that,

maybe it would be a good solution.

Something that disappears and then appears again.

Riding a bike in São Paulo

is a huge challenge.

You need to have a strong will.

Julie was a happy and a very cool girl.

She was killed here in 2011.

She was hit by a bus on Avenida Paulista.

She was on her way to work.

She was a biologist working with stem cells.

She used to bike calmly, she wasn't aggressive on her bike.

The bus was not in its lane. He squeezed her towards this lane.

Then, another bus ran over her.

When I see the ghost bikes, it's a shock.

Because it reminds me that it's possible to die biking.

It's a possibility and it sucks.

It reminds me that I'm in São Paulo.

When Julie died, we went there to understand what was happening,

why the cyclists get squeezed.

There's a place where the buses start accelerating,

they are able to overtake to get to the bus stop.

The bus driver can't really see the cyclist. It's a blind spot.

It is not the bus driver's or the cyclist's fault.

It's a faulty system that doesn't take people into account.

It's not designed for cyclists or for bus drivers.

The system itself creates this stress.

This is Paulista.

- Here? - Here.

This is the present Paulista.

The lane dimensions

allow cars to go 100 km per hour.

Our idea is to reduce the width of the lanes for cars,

and induce a speed of 40 to 50 km per hour.

This way we would gain two meters for a bike lane

and have an avenue with trees.

There would be not only segregation that allows a high traffic volume,

but it would also keep the cyclist safe.

This project is our own initiative.

There's no contract.

Being realistic, if nothing is done within the next 20 years,

it will never be done.

The traffic department makes adjustments for the flow of cars.

To prevent traffic jams and not to prevent...

risky situations for people.

The concern is about the flow of cars. It's not about people.

When the car industry became the main industrial sector

for Brazilian industrial development,

urban planning became completely car-oriented.

Brazil decided to leave completely

trains and trams

and replace them by cars and buses.

I remember the last major freeway to be built in Southern California.

The only freeway built in my memory is the 105 Freeway.

Uh, that freeway was finished in the 1990s.

And I remember, as it was being constructed,

going to a meeting with a couple of bike riders

and standing up and saying,

"You're pouring all this concrete,

can't you just put a bike lane on the side of it?"

And literally, people laughed hysterically at us.

I mean, they thought we were joking.

I really want to jump over this fence.

Here we are standing on the remnants of the old California Cycleway.