Streetfilms contributor Nicholas Whitaker files this report from Chicago, which put on a pair of major car-free events last month called Sunday Parkways. Recently Streetfilms has also covered car-free events in New York, Portland and San Francisco, and like the Summer Streets video, this one features a guest turn from Gil Peñalosa, one of the masterminds behind Bogotá's inspirational Ciclovía.

Peter Jackson ain't got nothing on Clarence Eckerson. Here is the third and final installment of Streetfilms' Bogotá trilogy based on the New York City Streets Renaissance team's visit with Gil Peñalosa in Colombia last September. Clarence writes:

You'll find lots of tasty video morsels including: riding some of the great ciclorutas and cycle paths, a visit to a thriving pedestrian-only street where they said it couldn't be done, a "bollard farm," mucho footage of the city's parks and public spaces and comments from the city's residents. And we couldn't resist -- just a wee bit more dance mania from the Recreovia.

If this is your first foray into Bogotá, you may want to check out these as well:

• Ciclovia Bogotá, Part I (9:41)
• Bus Rapid Transit Bogotá, Part II (7:29)
• Mark Gorton Interviews Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa (12:07)

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel with comrades Karla Quintero of Transportation Alternatives and Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek to Bogotá, Colombia to document some of the amazing advances going on in the livable streets movement there. We spent an entire Sunday, from 5am 'til nearly 5pm, riding bicycles around during Ciclovía, a weekly event in which over 70 miles of city streets are closed to traffic and opened to walking, biking, running, skating, recreating, picnicking, and talking with family, neighbors and strangers. Ciclovía was simply one of the most moving experiences I have had in my entire life (no pun intended).

I shot with no plan, not knowing much of what was coming up next while we rode our bikes, just trying to capture the event in the moment. We were aided tremendously by the indefatigable Gil Peñalosa, Executive Director of Walk and Bike for Life (yes, he is brother of Enrique, the former Bogotá mayor). Gil and his friendly support crew booked us an ambitious schedule and provided unparalleled access to people and places, allowing this mini film to be so much more than I had planned.

And dare I leave out our StreeJ Karla Q, who was just so great on the mic and shows she has some hot dance moves too. I think we came up with something very special and fun that will hopefully support and propel this movement forward in U.S. cities.

Read more of Clarence's thoughts on Ciclovía here.

Indeed, it is a new concept for New York City. And if one has never seen a city where it's done well, the idea of bicycles functioning as an extension of a transit system may be somewhat unimaginable.

I saw some great examples of a bike-oriented transit system just a few weeks ago during a trip to Bogotá, Colombia. I was there with StreetFilms' Clarence Eckerson, Transportation Alternatives' Karla Quintero and Project for Public Spaces' Ethan Kent. The New York City Streets Renaissance team was taken around the city by Gil Peñalosa, Bogotá's former Parks Commissioner and brother of former Mayor (and current mayoral candidate) Enrique Peñalosa and Eduardo Plata of the Fundación Por el País Que Queremos, otherwise known as The Foundation for the Country That We Care About.

(Update: Enrique lost the election to a far-left candidate promising an impossibly expensive subway system for Bogotá).

As a part of our tour, Gil took us to the Portal de las Américas, a major terminal of the TransMilenio bus system in the southwestern corner of the city. There, in the ground floor of the bus terminal, Gil showed us a bike parking facility unlike anything we have in New York and easily as nice as anything one might find in the most bike-friendly cities of Northern Europe.

With a ticket-taker, security guard and space for somewhere around 700 bikes it was, without question, the finest Cicloparqueadero any of us had ever seen (Granted, it was also the only Cicloparqueadero we'd ever seen).

New York City transportation advocates, I think, are accustomed to being told in contradictory fashion, that our various transportation agencies are either too focused on mega-projects to pay attention to something this small or too cash-strapped to do something this big. So, we immediately wanted to know how this project came about and how much it cost to build and run. Gil didn't have the numbers at his fingertips, but as a part of the mayoral administration that conceived and launched TransMilenio, he was able to explain the thinking behind it.

"For every 25 people who ride bikes to the terminal," Gil said, "That is one less 'feeder bus' we need to run through the neighborhoods. You do the math and pretty quickly you see it makes financial sense to set aside some space and hire a security guard to help people to ride their bikes."

Most of the TransMilenio system consists of these double-long red buses running along a four-lane, dedicated rights-of-way down the middle of major avenues and highways.

With no private motor vehicle traffic in their way and various other technological and design advantages, TransMilenio buses mostly run fast and according to schedule. Crosstown travel times on one major north-south route on the eastern edge of town dropped from 3 hours to 55 minutes once TransMilenio was up and running, officials told us. With wide doors, elevated platforms and passengers paying fares before they board, I finally understood why some people refer to TransMilenio as "surface subway."

TransMilenio also runs smaller green "feeder" buses like the one below. The green buses wend their way through neighborhood streets, picking up passengers and delivering them to major stations and terminals. A ride on a feeder bus is free, which is part of the reason why officials are eager to encourage bicycling to the bus terminals and major stations by funding a secure bike parking facility.

On our way to the Cicloparqueadero at Portal de las Américas, Peñalosa took us on a bike tour of one of the poorer sections of the city. We traveled through a neighborhood of unpaved roads overhung by jerry-rigged electrical wiring and surrounded, in spots, by open sewers. We rode past block after block of half-built cinder block housing covered with corrugated aluminum roofing. This was the scene I saw to my right.

To my left, there were cows grazing in an open drainage ditch. We were not talking about a particularly wealthy part of town.

Yet, in front of me, running right down the middle of this very same neighborhood was one of the finest bicycle and pedestrian paths I'd ever seen. It was as nicely designed and -- at 8am on a weekday -- as heavily used as any facility one might find in Denmark, Holland or Germany.

Gil explained that when Enrique was elected Mayor of Bogotá he scrapped plans to build a new network of elevated highways throughout the city. For just a fraction of the cost of the proposed highway system and in a much faster time frame, Peñalosa built TransMilenio and installed bicycle "arterials" down the middle of neighborhoods like the one above. Along these bikeways they built new schools, parks and connections to the rest of the city via TransMilenio.

How is it, we asked, that a city with about one-tenth the per capita income of New York was able to build one of sleekest, most efficient and high-tech surface transportation systems in the world? "It's not about the money," Gil told us again and again. "It's about the vision and it's about political will. The politicians can always find the money."

Photos: Aaron Naparstek, September 17, 2007

Guillermo ("Gil") Peñalosa has a message for you. Actually, he has about 100, but they all packed very nicely into his two hour presentation last Thursday night at Harlem's Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building.

The former Parks Commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia, joined by members of the Harlem Community Development Corporation, Project for Public Spaces, Transportation Alternatives, and the NYC Food and Fitness Partnership, plowed through mountains of statistics both scary (in the U.S., 13 pedestrians and two bicyclists are killed by automobiles every day) and encouraging (only six years after implementation, Bogotá's bus rapid transit system now transports 1.3 million commuters daily), peppering the numbers with memorable quips and tips: "I tell my friends, 'Don't wear spandex when you bike!' We need to wear regular clothes so people know bikers are not crazy weirdos!"

Peñalosa's presentation was a comprehensive sweep of the livable streets concept. With the U.S. population slated to experience a 33 percent jump in the next 50 years, he said the need to build ped-friendly new cities and retrofit existing ones has never been greater, and in New York, the timing has never been better, with the mayor and DOT on board for green initiatives with unprecedented zeal. Peñalosa stressed that a city is a means to a way of life: if we build our cities around cars, we will generate more cars, but if we build them around people, we will generate more people. Advocates have a number of arguments to boost the cause, he said, depending on whom they're talking to: livable streets bring in tourism and real estate revenue from sales tax; they decrease instances of obesity, respiratory ailments, and depression; they save lives by separating cars from pedestrians; they help curb carbon emissions and noise pollution; and they build community by requiring that people, outside the shield of their cars, "look each other in the eye."

The diverse crowd of about 30 was motivated to attend by a range of concerns. A woman from the Harlem CDC said she has traveled extensively and wishes there were more ped-friendly streets in NYC like Las Ramblas in Barcelona. Three young women from the Department of Health wanted to hear Mr. Peñalosa's ideas on the link between more car-free public space and less chronic disease. A DOT urban planner said she thinks more people are open now to ideas like congestion pricing than they were 10 years ago, but that it will still take "someone with political guts," like Mr. Peñalosa, to lead the way in implementing such "long overdue" reforms. But some were just in it for the fun. One man offered, "I'd just like to see 1.5 million people outside and physically active on a Sunday."

Photo by April Greene