“Improving cycling infrastructures in Ecuador”, 18-19 decembre 2018, Quito

This workshop was organized in the framework of a cooperation agreement between the French Ministry for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition (MTES) and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Transport and Public Works (MTOP), with the financial and technical support of the French Agency for Developement (AFD). As part of the same agreement, a study tour in France was also organized by CODATU in November 2018 with a delegation from the MTOP (read the article).

On 18th and 19th December, 2018, CODATU organized a 2-day workshop in Quito (Ecuador) in order to support the Ecuadorian Ministry (MTOP) in the preparation of its “Technical Manual for cycling infrastructures”. This manual will gather all the recommendations in terms of planning, design and construction of cycle lanes at the national level, in urban as well as rural areas. The ultimate objective would be to include these technical recommendations in the current regulation, in order to incentivise the use of bicycles (72,99km of cycle lanes in 2015 in Quito), to reduce the space given to private vehicles (vehicle fleet increasing each year of 11% in Quito) and work on multimodality as well as intermodality.

The workshop was organized in two stages:

• A first day dedicated to presentations from Ecuadorian speakers from MTOP, “Metro de Quito” company, the Mobility Secretariat and the Metropolitan Institute of Urban Planning, as well as presentations of french and international case studies by Sylvie Banoun, Interdepartmental Coordinator for cycling and walking in the French Ministry (MTES) and Thomas Jouannot, expert in active modes at CEREMA.
• A second day of interactive sessions, in a more restricted format (50 persons), where participants were asked to work on:
  • Recommendations to the Ministry and to the local authorities in terms of cycling infrastructures, development of parking spaces for cycles, implementation of strong communication campaings and improvment of intermodality;
  • Re-desiging sections of the road in Quito to integrate or improve the cycling infrastructures – on the basis of pictures brought by the participants.

The Tecnical Manual was shared with the participants as well as the other Municipalites who could not attend the workshop, in order to gather their feedbacks and finalize the document. The next objective would be to include these recommendations in the National Urban Mobility Policy (NUMP) to be developed in 2019 as part of the EUROCLIMA+ program. A process worth watching!

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