Bicycle path infrastructure in lima, Peru: Miraflores district case study

Abstract

The city of Lima presents a very uneven development of bicycle lanes in all its districts, where the district of Miraflores stands out as the one with the greatest development. The present work aimed to evaluate the bicycle infrastructure in this district. The applied methodology combined the land survey, with virtual surveys and processing of satellite images in a GIS environment. This evaluation was made based on the main aspects related to cycle-inclusivity, security, cohe-rence, direction, and infrastructure of the cycle. Among the main results, they stand out that the safety levels are low, which allows to infer that a greater number of physically segregated bike lanes should be promoted. The coherence is very poor in managing to connect several points of origin and destination, with numerous crossings. Although the main routes are fairly direct, the poor location of the bicycle parking facilities and the uneven distribution of the network still make it very inefficient. Despite the deficiencies that this cycling infrastructure still presents in Miraflores, there is a strong differentiation with the rest of the city of Lima, due, among other causes, to a high informality in the transport sector, derived from the application of policies neoliberals who have deepened the wide territorial and social inequalities in this city. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought in a new breed of cyclists, linked to «delivery» systems, further evidence of the limitations of the bicycle infrastructure throughout the city.