Moscow Women and Men Fight for Their Right to Bike
A number of brave Moscow bikers are standing up for their rights to peddle safely through the streets. More and more Moscow women and men are taking up biking as a way to get around the city and are clamoring for bike paths and more safety precautions for bicyclists.
There have not been statistics kept in regards to accidents in the city that involve cyclists, a city traffic police spokesperson stated that the frequency of those types of accidents is increasing. There is at least one accident a day in the city involving a car hitting a bicycle rider.
The biker organization Moscow Without Cars estimates that there are up to 4 million bikes in the city, but their owners are not able to use them because of a lack of biking infrastructure. The only bike paths in the city are in parks or recreation areas and are completely unsuitable for transportation purposes. The organization feels that bikers in Moscow have no rights at all.
The city feels that big cities, such as Moscow, are not suitable for bicycle transportation because of the long distances of travel involved and the cold temperatures in winter.
That is not stopping a large number of bikers in the city from getting together every month to ride down city streets trying to create a critical mass of bikers that will be hard to ignore.
