It is a fact well known that cycling is one of the healthiest forms of exercise, but with increasing rates of pollution levels and traffic congestion in the city, some individuals have taken this form of exercise to its old intended form of commuting to battle the larger environmental evils. Recognising the efforts of Firoza Suresh— who has made it her goal to encourage Mumbaikars to adopt cycling as an alternative means for commuting— has been recently named as the first Bicycle Mayor of the city.
As a part of ‘50by30’ initiative by Amsterdam based organisation BYCS, six people from the country are currently serving as Bicycle Mayors with an aim to make half of all city trips by bicycle by 2030. “Because their city is so cycling-centric, they came up with this whole mandate of having cities all over the globe to do what they do” informs Firoza. The goal of the organisation is to bring along the social, economic and environmental change by bringing a lifestyle change through cycling.
Although, as revealed by our own homegrown cycling crusader, when she picked up cycling in 2010, the aim was just to avoid the crammed local-train commute from Vile Parle to Dadar. Soon enough cycling turned into a passion and then the need to understand how many locks can one simple activity open as she founded Smart Commute Foundation in 2012. “Initially, it was more of trying to understand how the whole commute thing works. It was more of the walk the talk, and having a belief that cycling is an integral part through which the pollution and the congestion can be reduced in the commute,” she shares.
With BMC’s ambitious 36-km cycling track along the Tansa pipeline and the revamping of the Eastern waterfront by Mumbai Port Trust, the city will be seeing a fair share of new cycling paths and routes. But Firoza believes that to sustain these tracks, one need to focus on building the ridership to avoid the failure that the BKC cycling track witnessed. Hence, under the two flagship parallel programs Cycle 2 Work and Me Cycle Rider, Firoza has been actively focussing and working on creating a balance between the upcoming cycling infrastructures in the city to build up a significant ridership. “Unless we have created awareness about cycling and the ridership, you can’t sustain the cycle track. You need to create a sustainable program that will create ridership for the city which could be public bike sharing, creating road-safety programmes, incentives for people who cycle for work, creating programs for the underprivileged strata of the society, among others,” she says.
Apart from having created a network of 200 cycle ambassadors who help individuals by accompanying and acquainting them with cycle routes from their home to their work, Firoza also believes that equipping low-income members of the society with cycles and supporting infrastructures will be a catalyst to their aim. “Running is easy, you can even do it barefoot, but the first hurdle in cycling is the cycle itself. When we thought about our programs, it was easy to identify the need to convert the 9 million people from slums into cyclists to build up the ridership within the city. If the invisible cycle riders cycling along the length and the breadth of the city demand the captive audience that is the urban cyclists, then we’d have visible numbers and then the road safety aspect and cycle tracks will also come along,” she concludes.
