Remember when government people first cooked up the idea of creating the Ciclovía cycling  track alongside the Chapala-Jocotepec Carretera?

There was plenty public blowback, with folks claiming it was a was a huge waste of money and not enough people would use it to make the project worthwhile. Well, like the proverbial Field of Dreams, they built it and the cyclists have come…in droves.

Pause and watch from the roadside for a few minutes almost any time of day and you’ll catch sight of local workmen, exercise freaks, sport bikers and lots of foreigners pedal past at varied rates of speed. And although the vary name Ciclovía implies its principal purpose, that is to say it is specifically designed for bicycle riders, it has become a popular route for pedestrian traffic as well.

So what we find today is not a useless public works project, but rather a shared space in which a particular set of problems and conflicts are observed.

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