The struggle is real: Kyivans want to ride bicycles through the city freely and safely, no matter how hard the authorities try and ignore them.
The Ukrainian capital now has more bicyclists than ever before. Since the COVID‑19 pandemic, the number of bike riders in the streets has likely increased tenfold, if not more.
During the lockdown to prevent the novel coronavirus’ spread, many Kyivans opted to bike around the city instead of using taxis. Even after city transport resumed operations, some of them continue using their bikes — or electric scooters, unicycles, you name it.
Every morning and every evening, dozens of riders — including yours truly — rush along busy avenues, right next to endless streams of cars and buses.
Using a bike as your everyday mode of transport is a way to make a trivial thing like commuting between home and work a joyful little adventure. We all love the sensation of riding free on the road, hearing the wind whistling, enjoying the sunsets burning behind skyscrapers, being immune to traffic jams and compensating for our sedentary office work.
For these reasons, I do at least 30 kilometers each and every day.
But there’s a small problem: This city doesn’t love us cyclists back. In fact, sometimes these streets want us very much dead.
Kyiv calls itself a major European capital, but in terms of cycling infrastructure, we’re still in the stone age compared to even our neighbors like Warsaw, Bratislava or Budapest.
The Kyiv authorities have vowed to fix the problem and make Kyiv bike-friendly. That led to a perfect storm of useless and bizarre decisions that led to millions in budget funds being buried in the ground and even more of chest-beating by the city mayor Vitali Klitschko.
A woman holds a poster at the demonstration for cyclists’ rights in Kyiv on June 15, 2020. Ukrainian cyclists and their supporters gathered in front of city hall to demand infrastructure changes to protect bicyclists. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Formally, Kyiv now has nearly 100 kilometers of bicycle lanes scattered all across the city, and their number grows. But as one can see on the Kyiv map, many of them are quite short, sometimes just several hundreds of meters long.
They are not interconnected in a city-wide grid, and most of them start randomly, lead to nowhere and, thus, make no sense.
But even when it comes to bike lanes that seem long and consistent — such as the one running along the western half of Peremohy Avenue — you’re terribly wrong if you think you can ride with the wind straight from Akademmistechko metro station to the city center.
The first rule of street bicycling in Kyiv is: No one cares if there’s a bike lane and you want to use it. Most of the routes in this city are full of pop-up grocery markets, spontaneous illegal parking lots and massive crowds of roaming pedestrians who don’t give a damn that these lanes weren’t designated for their baby strollers.
In almost any city in Europe, they could be warned by police or even fined. In Brussels, I could easily take a cross-city ride between the NATO headquarters and the Grand Place without leaving safe bike lanes. In Boone County, Missouri, I felt like I was in a bicyclist’s paradise as I explored its legendary historic MKT trail across the state.
In Kyiv, meanwhile, I sometimes can’t ride 30 meters without shouting at people standing and talking in the middle of the bike lane in the Akademika Palladina Street — just because they can get away with it.
In compliance with the first rule of street bicycling in Kyiv, the police never react to cars parked in bike lanes. Very rarely do I see them towed away. In the rare case they are, it only happens in the city center.
Too many people still don’t perceive bicycles as real participants in street traffic. This effectively renders bike lanes, these poor bits of infrastructure, almost impossible to use.
People attend the demonstration for cyclists’ rights in Kyiv on June 15, 2020. Ukrainian cyclists and their supporters gathered in front of city hall to demand infrastructure changes to protect bicyclists. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Given the choice between possibly hitting a careless child standing in a bike lane and risking my life by driving among the cars, I favor the latter option. And I’m not alone in taking to the roadways.
It is a known fact that the modern motorcycle movement was founded by bored American military pilots seeking a new life on the edge after World War II. In this country, adrenaline junkies would find their fix on bicycles in the wild west of Kyiv street traffic.
It’s a cruel, unforgiving world that takes no prisoners and demands Green Beret-levels of survival skills.
Sticking to the extreme right lane and trying to breathe through the fog of exhaust, make sure the truck coming from behind is not going to smash you without even noticing.
Stay vigilant so as not to hit the suddenly opened door of a parked car. Check if another driver is entering the main lane at an intersection and starring into his smartphone. Make sure he’s aware that he must let you pass.
No one cares if this section of Shevchenko Boulevard is an officially approved bus-bike lane. If some driver thinks it’s wise to leapfrog a traffic jam at a wild speed, the odds are high you’ll be exposed to the very real danger of being run over.
And no matter how carefully you follow the rules, an ignorant abuser behind the wheel can pop up at any moment and finish it all within a second.
Joking aside, the Kyiv roads are a dangerous place for bicyclists.
During recent rallies near the Kyiv administration, bike activists said at least five riders had been killed in traffic accidents since the beginning of 2020. New scandals erupt almost every week, such as a July 16 incident when the president of the Roshen Corporation, Vyacheslav Moskalevskiy, hit two bicyclists, allegedly on purpose, and fled the site.
On July 24, there will be yet another rally demanding that the authorities finally ensure European safety standards for bicycle traffic in Kyiv. The activists want new rules obliging vehicles to stay at least 1.5 meters away from bikes on the road and increasing criminal liability for ignorant and disrespectful drivers who provoke dangerous accidents.
In a major European city in 2020, there can be no excuse for exposing bicyclists to potential death just because they want to use this clean and healthy transport in everyday life.
