Overview

A group of citizen cyclists have banded together across Mexico to leverage Mapillary to map and evaluate dedicated cycling lanes and paths. The project follows the framework of the World Bicycle Forum Mexico City 2023 "Peripheral Vision" and is focused on not only Mexico City, but also Leon (Guanajuato), Hermosillo (Sonora), Playa del Carmen (Quintana Roo), Cuernavaca, and Yautepec (Morelos). This joint effort aims to generate useful information for decision making about cycling mobility in urban Mexico, bringing together field data collection, street-level imagery, and data visualization to get a clear look at the cycling networks.

How It Works

The project adopts the participatory mapping methodology developed by the Ciudata/Repubikla working group, which has conducted similar assessments of pedestrian mobility and public spaces (see: Mapeaton, CallesVioletas).

Success was defined by checking off the following goals:

• Investigate existing public mapping of the bikeways to assess their completeness.
• Submit information requests to government agencies through the Transparency Unit. For Mexico City, information was requested at the level of the 16 municipalities of the metropolitan area and their respective Secretaries of Mobility. In the case of the State of Mexico, requests were made in 22 more of its municipalities adjacent to Mexico City.
• Organize a group of volunteers who each took responsibility for a separate section of the existing cycleways, using the following map as a progress monitor:
• 
• Conduct field mapping with the Mapillary mobile app and bicycles. For six weeks prior to the Forum, each volunteer rode on all the cycleways of their area of responsibility in their free time, equipped with Mapillary on a mobile phone. They clearly captured the start, end, transitions, and various interruptions of the complete cycleway network.
• Upload the data to Mapillary: after the volunteers captured Mapillary sequences across the cycleway networks, they uploaded them to Mapillary’s servers for processing. The resulting street imagery would then be visible to all Mapillary users.

Mapping The Outcome

At the conclusion of the project, the team of volunteers covered 98% of bike routes in Mexico City, excluding some stretches used purely recreationally. On November 3, at the World Bicycle Forum, the team held a presentation and discussion session, which was streamed and recorded via Facebook live.

We presented the collected data at this session, and featured an interactive map of bike paths and bike lanes in Mexico City (and the other involved cities in Mexico) on the Mapillary platform.

The completion of this project will enable several sister initiatives to launch:

1. A swift quality assessment of existing cycling infrastructure
2. An analysis of cyclists’ perceptions of the safety of bike networks
3. A documentation and status report of bike lanes, created by community and activists’ efforts

As cyclists, road users, and urban planners, the exercise empowered the participants and stakeholders to observe the state of the cycling networks and experience even the most uncommon aspects of a cyclist's journey.

Paco de Anda: "[In Léon], I rode through places where I had never ridden before. The constant stream of urban cyclists around me is surprising at almost any hour, even if it's not a workday. While bike lanes along the median are not recommended, the cyclist demand is such that in León, [we use what is available]."

Uriel: "[Having] the perspective of a person who starts using a bicycle in the city… leads us to rethink how we generate infrastructure for people who should be able to use bicycles in a continuous and presumably safe way on local routes.”

Céline: "As a woman in the city, the bike has undoubtedly offered me safety and a barrier against harassment. However, I realized that when riding in spaces where there are no bike lanes and where I’m forced to zigzag between cars, I was once again exposed to harassment when passing very close to cars and their occupants.”

Conclusions

This participatory exercise is an important step toward improving cycling mobility in Mexico City and urban areas across Mexico. It produced exhaustive, actionable, and publicly accessible data. The information derived from this data will constructively guide decision making in regards to cycling infrastructure planning. It will also help promote cycling and improve safety for cyclists, prioritize maintenance of public space, and evaluate public transport infrastructure in Mexico.

Communities across other cities and countries are rallying around similar efforts, but since these efforts do not upload via the same "organization" in Mapillary, it becomes difficult to coherently filter this data in order to present it clearly to planners and decision makers. To address this, the community in Mexico also encourages other communities to repeat some of their past routes within Mapillary "organizations" at the national level (See Ciclovías Guatemala, and Bogota work). They can also contact the Mapillary team to ask that their past sequences are transferred to a common organization.

The team behind this project emphatically invites more global communities to join the initiative with the World Bike Forum, pursuing the noble project of documenting their integrated cycleway and bike lane systems!

/Céline & Uriel