TUMI Pilot: Cycling in Lviv

Lviv was the first city in Ukraine where bicycles appeared in the 19th century. Today, given the current socio-political and economic situation brought up by the war, many people are getting on the bicycles to move around, as gas prices increase, and fossil fuel-based mobility becomes more expensive.
Join us on this Cycling Tour around the historical city of Lviv, in West Ukraine with Yuri Ter- Arutiunian, a mobility activist and active citizen of Lviv. Hit play and “get riding” on this video-tour!

foreign [Applause] was the first city in Ukraine where bicycles appeared cycling became popular at the end of the 19th century there were so many cyclists that even special cycling traffic rules were introduced at the beginning of the 20th century the proportion between cyclists and car users were 50 bicycles for one car the next cycling popularity increase happened around 2010 when the cycling Community became active and started demanding bicycle infrastructure a working group including City officials was created to cooperate on further steps to develop bikeways City Transport infrastructure advisor helped start the process besides the city started cooperation with European Partners like giz and others in 2011 Luigi has become the first city in Ukraine that introduced the bikeways development plan for the next nine years and already in 2015 first Ukrainian public bike sharing system was introduced in live and it still operates a number of cycling events started to be regularly held back to work Bicycle Day Women’s bike parade European Mobility week and several sports events three years ago we had a boom of electric scooters when the first sharing systems appear in the city and we still experience it now and scooter drivers use the same bikeways a lot of delivery services use bikes as their main type of delivery transport even the city police has a bicycle unit they demand for the quality cycling infrastructure increases what should we do to make cycling more popular make it safe first we need bicycle base for safety it’s not always safe to ride together with vehicles and cycling on sidewalks is not safe for pedestrians and it’s actually forbidden a cyclist needs his own space for some people’s effects that say do not feel safe in the only thing that stops them from using bytes on everyday basis make it convenient [Music] second is the convenience if you have a smart bike way to your destination you don’t need to search for race together you get less stress besides we’ve got a lot of streets covered in cobblestones in the historical City Center so you just need a flat surface to ride especially if you’re not riding a mountain bike with fat tires keep the bikeways accessible sometimes even when you have a psychopath it’s difficult to use it for example if you have dangerous rain catchers on your way there are some places where the cars are parking on the psychopath in Winter they often blow snow on the cycle lanes and finally the offer increases the demand the more Sports Cycles get from the authorities the easier is to develop cycling present day station while weave is often called the cycling capital of Ukraine we have more than 100 kilometers of cycling waste in the city the research shows that more than six percent of people use bicycles to get around the city as a transportation means so back to work bike to school and so on and more than 51 percent of families in live own at least one bicycle that means we can get even more regular cyclists if we provide them with needed conditions several City districts are connected with bikeways there are also good cycling planning examples bicycle traffic lights bike counter Lanes separate bike routes protected by planes traffic calming and so on and for some of the planning Solutions Louis was the first city in Ukraine to introduce them a lot of Ukrainian cities took leave as an example the updated Ukrainian Street build building regulations now made cycling infrastructure obligatory on the main streets of every city so we have got a number of bikeways during the process of Street reconstruction the number of cyclists still increases and so does the demand for cycling infrastructure development sadly there was no much progress recently for the last three years almost no cycling projects have been accomplished and some of them were stopped somewhere in the middle however there is at least one great cycling project that the city has started recently and tries to accomplish green line to sahib District it is a separate pedestrian and Bikeway to the highly populated city area by the way bikeway’s development plan is outdated for now and it was never fully completed we had to have 268 kilometers of bikeways before 2020 and we build less than half of them the good news is that we have already started developing the new and even better plan what went wrong there is a number of reasons for the decrease in building cycling infrastructure one of them is that leaf city council has no cycling department or any other institutions or officials that are responsible for building bikeways in leave however a new mobility department was created last year in leaf city council and I believe a bicycle officer should be appointed within that department the other reason is priorities the city often ignored the bikeways development plan most of the local deputies are not interested in developing cycling infrastructure and they don’t vote for spending money for that but the most important reason is economic situation first it was a caveat pandemic that struck the city budget and right after that it is a devastating War apart from genocide and country’s infrastructure destruction Russians also tried to kill our economy and all of us started to feel the consequences thus most of the projects were canceled all over the country why do we need to develop cycling infrastructure as soon as possible present-day War caused some fuel shortages that is why some car owners started using bicycles for transportation the good news is that there is a good City for cycling and the bad one we still lack bikeways and have a lot to do in cycling infrastructure development the city life has to go on and cycling is one of the base out the population of leave increased by 250 000 people since February 2022 and all those people have to get around the city however not all of them own a car and not always made the public transport cope with all those passengers that is where bicycles may also help the need to quickly expand the cycling Network became obvious during the coveted time and that is when we had to create separate bike Lanes instead of the street space that’s not being used effectively the most difficult challenge due to our severe situation is lack of money surely we need to invest in defense however the transportation problems are already here and we have to cope with them as soon as possible we still have the whole districts without buy claims different parts of the city are not connected to each other with cycling infrastructure and different bikeways are not merged into a common system some of the bike Lanes already need to be repaired and for some of them the location needs to be changed we’ve already got a great start and a good cycling tradition we just need a little bit more effort and live has all chances to become a city that will be an example to follow hope to see you soon in review goodbye [Music] thank you foreign [Music]