Yuriy Lozovenko, youth coordinator of Friends of the Earth Ukraine shares this photo report from the recent Bicycle day in Dnipropetrovsk that they organised.
This year the annual Bicycle Day has been held on May, 31st, the last saturday of spring. Despite the rainy weather still over 500 cyclists came.
Every year we ride in a row like this to show that there’s hundreds and thousands of us who want to have equal rights in the city streets, who want to have an appropriate infrastructure and just to have fun riding bikes instead of cars or jitneys… And the number of us grows twice every year!
For the day we made posters with messages “Bicycle is also transport“, “Equal rights to drivers and cyclists“, “Save the city ecology – choose a bike!”, etc… but weather broke our plans a bit!
Still in our city the Bicycle Day is considered to be in some way more like a sports event, rather than an action for cyclists rights. We don’t agree with this outlook, which actually slows down the processes with developing cycling infrastructure. The city authorities still consider cycling as sports or a spare time activity, rather than regular transport. But transport infrastructure for bikes (so all categories of existing and potential cyclists would use it) is the main aim of all the activities we re running.
Yuriy and others getting ready at the start
Bikes lined up along the Dnipro before the start of the ride
Forming the row of bicycles
Over 500 cyclists turn out to cycle the streets of Dnipropetrovsk, despite the rain
On the way… The distance for the ride was over 12 km
Arriving to the Youth Park, where the ride ended and we all had competitions and lots of fun!