India’s First ‘Bicycle Mayor’ Is Bringing Cycling Culture Back To The Streets

Every day, thousands of Indians commute across their city, either in their own car, an Uber or local taxi. We watch in vain as traffic lights resist turning green, and even catch up on some sleep, our necks craning on the same car seat thats had us for hours. For three years now, Nikita Lalwani, an instrumentation engineer, has avoided the long hours of traffic and the anxiety that comes with being stuck in an endless line of four-wheeled vehicles.

In 2014 a flyover construction close to her residence almost doubled her commute time to work, encouraging Lalwani to begin cycling to work. A visit to Germany the same year, where she saw a majority of people having chosen cycling as their preferred mode of transport, further inspired her and a couple of her colleagues to begin doing the same. In 2015, Lalwani launched Cycling Cities, an initiative that targets motivating one-third of the population of every Indian city to embed cycling into their everyday lifestyles by 2030 – they want to ‘bring the cycling culture back’.

Through Cycling Cities, Lalwani wishes to create a sort of cycling ecosystem, both on and offline, encouraging users through their ‘TRING’ or ‘Try Cycle’ project, in which they can buy and sell used cycles in their cities as well as receive related advice and guidance. Cycling Cities believes that every school and college organisation should encourage cycling as well, and wishes to promote a healthy lifestyle through cycling for anyone interested. It has received wonderful reception so far, and Lalwani was selected for IIM Udaipur’s woman entrepreneurship programme in 2016 for her startup.

CycleSpace, a Dutch organisation that promotes cycling around the world, elected Lalwani to be the Bicycle Mayor of Vadodara – a first in India. As the recipient of this significant title, she recently attended the Bicycle Mayor Summit in Amsterdam in June, which is soon going to be followed by another, bigger cycling conference, the Velo-City 2017. She was delighted to have crowdfunded a large part of her visit to the Netherlands. “CycleSpace has launched a project Bicycle Mayor Network for promoting cycling and sustainable mobility by developing innovative ideas. The idea is to build a network of cycling representatives worldwide. I had approached them for selecting me as Bicycle Mayor as I want to promote cycling and also develop infrastructure for the same in the city,” Lalwani tells the Times of India in an interview.

Lalwani doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon. She’s begun with Vadodara, her city, and is working towards bettering cycle-parking facilities and encouraging the Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) to build cycling tracks across the city. Her initiative, Baroda by Cycle, has been conducting guided tours around the city since April 18.

For years now, Lalwani has chosen a far healthier lifestyle because of her cycling, and has inspired so many into the fitness, excitement and the adventure that comes with it. It’s time we take a cue from her and make the eco-friendly shift.

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