The intersection of Avenida Leste Oeste and Avenida Pasteur in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza was always tricky to navigate by bicycle, especially heading east as three lanes of car traffic became two. Data show that every 60 minutes during rush hour, 360 cyclists had to maneuver around and between 2,700 cars, trucks and motorcycles without any protections.
Such conditions are not conducive for cycling, to say the least. Yet bicycles hold much promise as both a mode of transport and a way for Fortalezenses to pursue a more active lifestyle and resist the obesity epidemic sweeping Brazil, where more than half of the population is overweight or obese. With obesity rising by more than 67 percent in the past 13 years, the onus was on my administration to make cycling a more popular choice.
Our goal was to make Fortaleza — a beautiful coastal city and Brazil’s fifth-largest municipality, with more than 2.6 million residents — safer as well as healthier. So, we began to adopt incentives to encourage cycling, particularly measures to make it a better transport option.
The most obvious place to begin was with bike lanes. When roads do not contain dedicated lanes, cyclists have few rights and little safety. Between 2010 and 2018, there were 222 crashes involving bikes on Fortaleza’s roads. Too many families have been torn apart because their youngest and healthiest members are incapacitated or killed on their daily commutes.
At the start of 2013, when we stepped into office, the city had only 68km of bike lanes, and many of our sidewalks were falling into disrepair or being used as parking lots, forcing pedestrians into streets that were jammed with cars.
RECOGNITION
However, after six years of addressing our infrastructure, our efforts gained international recognition for reclaiming more than 12km2 of streetscape for pedestrians and almost quadrupling the total length of bike lanes to 263km.
Today, four out of every 10 Fortalezenses live within 300m of cycling infrastructure — the best result among Brazilian state capitals, according to the New York City-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Given that many studies have found that introducing bike lanes has a positive economic impact, especially on local businesses, we believe we made a wise investment.
Of course, not everyone can ride a bike. That is why we also invested in dedicated bus lanes. The increase from 3.2km of dedicated lanes in 2013 to 115.9km last year has allowed our buses to go from pedestrian speed to bike speed. The hope is that these improvements will encourage more people to switch to a healthier, faster and more environmentally sustainable mode of transport on the way to and from work.
One of the biggest hurdles to commuting by bike is that too few people own one. Theft and the cost of purchasing and repairing a bike are the main barriers. Bike sharing removes these obstacles.
BIKE SHARING
In Fortaleza, a new subsidized bike-share project called Bicicletar Corporativo provides city employees with bike access from 16 stations spread across the downtown area. The program serves as a model for private companies to consider when encouraging their own staff to commute by bike.
All of these improvements, as well as events such as Car Free Day in September last year, are meant to make the city safer, not just for cyclists, but for everybody on the road. And they have worked. Between 2014 and 2018, road traffic deaths recorded by traffic and health authorities fell by 40 percent, from 377 to 226.
Today, you can get on a bike and ride west in a dedicated lane on Avenida Leste Oeste that takes you safely through the intersection with Avenida Pasteur. On the return trip, you can ride the eastbound lane — the medians have been reworked and part of the roadway has been permanently set aside for bikes. The installation last year of new signaling, lane markings and reserved areas for bikes in front of the stoplights is just the latest in a series of road safety upgrades being implemented across the city.
Keeping pace with transportation trends can improve public health and boost economic growth. In Fortaleza, we are embracing the cycling trend because the benefits are enormous. Our city is changing for the better. More people are riding bikes and more safely than ever, contributing to cleaner air and greater well-being with every commute. Other cities can do it, too. Those that maintain streetscapes designed strictly for automobile traffic will only be left behind in the decades ahead.
Roberto Claudio Rodrigues Bezerra is mayor of Fortaleza, Brazil, and a member of the Partnership for Healthy Cities, a network supported by the WHO, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Vital Strategies.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the new year dawns, Taiwan faces a range of external uncertainties that could impact the safety and prosperity of its people and reverberate in its politics. Here are a few key questions that could spill over into Taiwan in the year ahead. WILL THE AI BUBBLE POP? The global AI boom supported Taiwan’s significant economic expansion in 2025. Taiwan’s economy grew over 7 percent and set records for exports, imports, and trade surplus. There is a brewing debate among investors about whether the AI boom will carry forward into 2026. Skeptics warn that AI-led global equity markets are overvalued and overleveraged
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
RSS