Biking challenges

I like to commute on bike and have been doing it my entire adult life.  It is harder in Brasília than in any other place I have lived.  It shouldn’t be.  I am only four miles from the Embassy and there is lots of open space.  But the city is poorly designed for bikes or people and not even very good for cars.  But I persist in riding.

It is pretty good in Lago Sul.  Lago Sul is more like an ordinary city.  The trouble starts when you get to the lake.  You can see the picture of the bridge above.  The pedestrian part of the bridge is around three feet above the road and only about three feet wide.  It is constructed of concrete panels.  I was afraid to ride on it at first, since falling in either direction would be very bad.  On the one side you would fall into traffic, on the other into the lake.  But I got used to it, avoiding the big cracks.  Recently, however, one of the panels fell in, as you see in the picture.  I have to get off the bike and walk carefully at that part.

Brasilia has a lot of potential and could easily be retrofitted to make it much more user friendly.  There are some nice roads for biking, but they often don’t connect to anything or connect into big roads that as designed only for cars.     

Until we reach that bright happy situation where hardships don’t prevail, however, I would be content if they fixed the bridge.