Mexico City’s ‘Move by Bike’ (Muévete en Bici) is a Sunday Bike Program that encourages residents to use carbon-neutral transportation by closing major throughways in the city center to motor vehicles, effectively giving the right of way to cyclists every Sunday from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM. On some weeks, 80,000 residents of Mexico City turn out to participate in the program.

Despite the program’s success, Mexico City remains far from a biker’s paradise; the city is notoriously automobile-friendly, and drivers often don’t follow rules that require them to share lanes with bicycles, drive aggressively, drive on sidewalks, drive in the wrong direction on one-way streets, and so on.

Launched in 2007 by Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, the Sunday Bike Program is a component of City’s overall Bicycle Mobility Strategy. It was created to give city residents a taste of bicycling, with the intention that a bicycle-friendly constituency would help pave the way for other bike-friendly measures, including additional bike lanes. The strategy seems to have paid off with the introduction of the EcoBici bike-sharing system in 2010, that has met with some success.