Traffic-free Sundays for D.F.

Another traffic change in Mexico City. On Sundays, the main streets in the Centro (including sections of Reforma) are closed to vehicular traffic.

S. Lynne Walker of Copley News Service writes:

On a recent Sunday morning, Ebelio Sánchez caught himself grinning and waving as the city’s residents pedaled by. Sánchez, 46, who has been a Mexico City traffic cop for nearly half his life, is used to seeing people “mad and bothered.”

But on this sunny morning, there was no cacophony of blowing horns, no obscene gestures, no shouted insults from rolled-down car windows.

There were serene smiles, the fluttering of silk ribbons in a little girl’s hair, the soft sound of the wind whooshing through the spokes of spinning bicycle tires.

“You don’t have to be rich or poor to ride a bike,” said Juan Cervantes, a 35-year-old father of two. “This is a way for everybody in the city to go out and have fun.”

Not everybody likes the idea, of course.

“They’re in the way here,” Gerardo Gómez, a 57-year-old fabric store owner, groused as he waited in his neatly pressed suit for a shoeshine on Reforma boulevard. “People . . . want to ride in their cars. I don’t think that is going to change.”

But Martín Gómez, a 45-year-old accountant and member of a bicycle club called Bicitekas, disagreed.

“This will make the city more humane,” he said. “The city is collapsing from so many cars and contamination. A journey of 10,000 miles starts with one step. This is the first step.”