translated from Spanish: Demand for bicycles continues to rise and new cycle paths opened

The executive director of the Industrial Chamber of Motorcycle, Bicycle, Rolls and Related (Cimbra), Daniel Tigani, stated to Télam that with the pandemic “the bicycle industry became a boom” and estimated that by the end of the year approximately 1.6 million units will be sold.” We came from bad years of selling, but since mid-June we have tremendous demand, so we started working as hard as possible because I think this choice of bike is going to hold beyond the pandemic, it came to stay,” he assessed.

For its part, the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, added 17 kilometers of cycle paths on Corrientes and Córdoba avenues, so that cyclists have a safe place to ride a bike. This is Sustainable Mobility Week and the use of bicycles is motivated as it benefits health, the environment and avoids using public transport that is only for essential workers.
On the other hand, the mobility of the City during the coronavirus pandemic saw a “historical situation” in which the most notorious impact was on the metro transport service, where a mark was registered that reflected a minimum of passengers transferred equivalent to 2% of the usual users in a day before quarantine.

Six months after the start of the isolation, the Ministry of Transport and Public Works issued a report inging that the subway had moved 20,000 users per day when, in pre-pandemic days, it was used by more than 1 million people. The train service also reduced the number of people using it by up to 90% and the collective recorded casualties of 79%; while freight motorways also handled minimum values, as traffic during the first few weeks of quarantine remained 78% lower than usual. In the first week released from the beginning of the isolation, which runs from Monday 22 March to Friday 26, there were 19,800 trips on the 55,500 trains on 952,000 trips on buses; and 265,000 vehicles passed through the porteñas highways, according to the AUSA register. Meanwhile, as early as week 26 quarantine, which began on Monday 7 September to Friday 11, records indicate that there were 77,000 subway trips, 211,000 trains, 2.8 million by bus and 768,000 cars were circulated on the motorways. In this regard, the Secretary of Transport and Public Works of Buenos Aires, Juan José Méndez, considered that “the pandemic put in crisis high-density models in public transport and in public space”. He said that with the pandemic, in which public transport can only be used by essential workers, “a trend towards individual mobility of people” was observed, so he stated that “we wanted to accompany from the state the use of the bicycle, so we advanced in two cycle paths on the Avenidas Corrientes and Córdoba”.

Original source in Spanish