like to cycle in my neighbourhood. Twice or thrice a week, if I am lucky. Just as a form of exercise, but also because I had loved cycling as a child. It was a skill that one took up as a challenge.
I still recall the joy, the immense freedom, of being able to balance the bicycle while pedalling, the wind touching my skin, blowing my hair away.
Cycling around the city was a passion I carried with me well into my middle age. I bought one, finally, around my fiftieth birthday. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, one noticed a lot of bicycles on the roads. These were not the usual mazdoor cycles that kept plying on one end of the road as before; these were fancier bikes, driven by middle class enthusiasts at a time when parks and gyms were all closed. The roads had become cycle-friendly too.
I still see some of this cycling-for-the-purpose-of-exercise in the city, usually very early morning or at night, though I do keep thinking why can’t we use cycling as a means of transport. For instance, why can’t I go to my office on a bicycle when it will take me as much time, a few minutes here and there, as in a private car.
I make a mental map of the two possible routes from Upper Mall to Garden Town, one being the Canal Road and the other that passes through Jail Road and Gulberg Main Boulevard (both these routes are signal-free, they say). I shudder at the thought. All I can imagine is being run over by a fast moving vehicle or a zigzagging motorbike on day one of the adventure. With or without the helmet may not matter.
At the risk of sounding ‘anti-development,’ I feel the signal-free roads have ruined mine and everyone else’s chances of using a cycle (the pedestrians were written off early, to be accommodated later through a few overhead bridges that are certainly not enough).
The thing is I’ve not been considering using cycling as a mode of transport as some sort of a whimsical, romantic notion. It’s a realistic possibility, a serious proposal that should be on our urban planners’ and policy makers’ tables. This is something that is being thought about and put into practice in many metropolises around the world (not just the developed world, mind you).
How to go about making Lahore a ‘cycle city’ is worth a thought because the alternatives are only making the city messier. Vehicular traffic has been cited as a major cause of smog in winter months, but the transport emissions are responsible for the dangerous air quality all year round. Somebody needs to think about it before we are forced to shut down the city, no?
Also, as per all estimates till now, only eight percent of the city’s population uses private cars, and look at the road and parking infrastructure that has been put in place for them.
Thankfully, our decision makers and planners will not have to reinvent the wheel. Others have done that already. The 15-minute city is an idea being tried in places where it was unthinkable, like Paris. Our planners will have to think of designated bike lanes, to start with. Before they reject it at the outset, I’d advise them to compare the cost of investment on bike lanes with all the money being spent on the mass transit schemes and the continuing subsidies.
This notion of making Lahore a cycle city has to be conceived in totality, making connections with other transport networks. But it can begin as a pilot project for, say, 10 kilometres, and then adding more.
To me a pop-up bike lane is the only solution, to ensure the safety of the cyclists. We need bicycle stands across the city, bicycles for hire, bike lanes on bridges, and so on. It is doable. The utopia shall work when more people start using it. Actually, less private, polluting vehicles on roads will make it a utopia we all seek once on the roads.
Lahoris need to feel well and healthy. Lahore needs to breathe clean air. Its public face needs a display of less inequality, by the ‘Fortuners’ of the city. I need to keep dreaming it will happen one day, in my lifetime maybe.
The writer is the director of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and a former editor of The News on Sunday
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