"We build a new city every Sunday," his colleague Katherin Amaya Roa shouted over the clatter. From 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday mornings, Bogotá draws more than 1.5 million people out into the streets to bike, walk, skate, and roll. Keeping 75 miles of asphalt free from cars for seven hours is the purpose of this weekly predawn hubbub, and every last item here has been meticulously ordered so that it can be dropped off, according to each intersection's traffic pattern, from the back of an open truck.
The seven-hour respite from Bogotá's notorious traffic and dirty air is called Ciclovía, and this chilly morning marked its 50th birthday. More than 400 cities have borrowed the idea, from Los Angeles to São Paolo to Addis Ababa. If you have ever walked on a car-free roadway in your city, you have walked in the long shadow of Bogotá's Ciclovía.
Everyone who works on the event, whether closing the streets or selling snacks, describes it with the Spanish verb for getting up long before dawn, which sounds like what it feels like: madrugar. But there is joy in this ritual, too. Shivering beside Osorio for this occasion was the ebullient Lucy Barriga, who ran Ciclovía in the 1990s and established a similar event in Guadalajara, Mexico. "It always brings a lot of emotion to be back here," she said.
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