Colombia. Each year, ITDP and Sustainable Transport Award select a city that has implemented innovative sustainable transport projects in the previous year. These strategies improve the mobility of all residents, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution from transportation, and improve safety and access for cyclists and pedestrians.
Seventeen years after its first Sustainable TransportAtion Award in 2005, Bogotá, Colombia won the award again, this time, for transportation interventions that expand the safety and mobility of the city's most vulnerable residents.
To improve public and environmental health, the city of Bogotá has assembled a fleet of 1485 electric buses for its public transportation system, placing the city among the three largest electric bus fleets outside of China. So far 350 buses have been deployed, and the change will most benefit low-income residents, whose neighborhoods have the most bus lines and the highest levels of air pollution in the city. In addition, Bogotá has initiated a new program that provides exemptions to HOVs, vehicles with more than 2 passengers, from the city's even and odd license restriction program. This program prevents half of the city's cars from driving at peak times, but by allowing HOV exemptions, the city aims to encourage car-sharing and hopes to reduce car travel by 2 million kilometers per week.
The City also worked to improve road safety with speed control programs that lowered speed limits and deployed measures to calm traffic. The reduction in speed on major roads led to a 21% decrease in traffic fatalities in 2019 compared to the 2015-2018 average, and a 28% decrease in 2020.
Travel safety efforts focused on some of Bogota's most vulnerable residents, schoolchildren. The city found that 58 percent of student trips are made on foot, mostly by low-income children. At the same time, pedestrians under the age of 15 were twice as likely to die in a traffic incident as adults. To change this, Bogotá initiated a Kids First program that targets students traveling on foot, but also focuses on providing transportation solutions to students traveling in the different modes of transportation. Among other initiatives, the program created caravans escorted by adults, for young travelers who travel to school, both on foot and by bicycle, which have so far helped more than 6,000 students in 2021 to reach class safely.
Bogota will be joined by two cities with honorable mention: Peshawar, Pakistan and Tartu, Estonia.
