Original subtitles

Last week, a bike protest tried to cross the bridge.

They were stopped and could not proceed...

- And then on the next day... - It was one police per activist, right?

Rafael made a video. I think it is on the "Bike È Legal"-blog.

William, you contacted the Transport Secretary

about the bike lane at Paulista, right?

I sent an email, and got no reply, as always.

In 2008, I moved here to study.

I planned to bring my car.

There was a lot of traffic and I was scared to drive.

I took the bus the first six months. It was very expensive.

One day, I rode my bike to the university.

I didn't know anyone in town. I did it on my own.

It was really scary.

But I arrived at school active, with a clear mind,

happier, more energetic and full of adrenalin.

This made me do that again and again.

One day I was a bike rider in São Paulo.

Today, I have a lot of friends, a true family here.

We are trying to understand what is happening to our city.

What influences the mayor's decision

in building cycle paths or a bridge for cars?

Why is public transportation expensive even though it's so bad?

Who makes the choice? What's the criterion?

Who funds this? What are their motives?

I think this is the key problem of every city.

I love bicycles and I hate to drive, so I really shouldn't be living in LA.

I want to be on my bike or walking as much as possible,

and I've pretty much constructed my life so that I can ride my bike often.

Do you want to go downstairs, kid, are you ready?

Are your shoes on the wrong feet again? Yes. Are you ready?

- You didn't pack any snacks? - I haven't packed any snacks, no.

- Come on. - No, I'm scared.

- It's too hard to walk down the steps. - 'Cause your shoes are on wrong.

- Sit right there while I open the garage. - It's time to open the garage!

Let's go!

In the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century,

about 20% of the people in LA commuted by bike.

People didn't get in their car and drive two hours the way they do to work now,

people worked in their communities.

It was a different Los Angeles then.

All around LA in the 1900s

people were riding bicycles.

If you can just imagine 20% fewer cars on the street,

I mean that alone is like an idea that makes you happy.

So when you are doing exploration in Los Angeles,

you don't want to get into people's backyards too much,

that could get dangerous, someone could shoot you.

There used to be a bicycle freeway that ran through here.

- Do you know anything about that? - The slab's still there, it's city-owned.

- Cool. Well, thank you. - You're welcome.

It was probably like 7 or 8 years ago that I saw this iconic picture

of these cyclists coming down from Pasadena on this wooden boardwalk.

It was hard to believe.

My first thought was, where was that? Is it still there?

Why is it gone? Who tore it down?

What I often do is look between the houses,

because the cycleway would've been behind all these houses here.

When you see that picture, you can't help but wonder what it would be like

if every freeway in Los Angeles was a bicycle freeway instead of a car freeway.

Welcome to Cars and Coffee, Irvine.

If you're a car-lover, this is kind of Mecca for us.

What you see here is almost a hundred years' worth of automotive history,

sitting in this parking lot.

If you don't understand this, you don't understand automobiles.

The guys who drive these cars dream about being that race car driver.

They know they're not, but it makes them feel like they have that in them.

It makes them feel like they could be,

that they are driving the same car that some guy drove at Le Mans.

Or drove on Sunday race track.

"I could drive like him. And I want to be him."

And it makes you feel better about yourself. It just does.

Look at you... Mr. Man!

Beautiful...

- That was great, thank you. - Yes, that was a treat.

Do I want to have cleaner air for my kids? Do I not want climate change?

Yeah, you're damn right. And I think these things are facing us right now.

I'd say that everybody in this parking lot, even though we all love gasoline

and we all want, you know, our gas-powered cars,

at the same time, we want cleaner air and we don't want

the climate to be changing as dramatically as it is right now.

That's a scary thing for us. So these people want to do something too.

What you'll find is, at the end of the day, we're all fighting the war on oil.

Right? We're addicted to it. We want it and we love it.

It's really fun and it's part of who we are.

You got a hundred years of history sitting here in this parking lot.

You don't want to walk away from that, I don't want to walk away from that!

I'm not selling my gasoline car, and I'm as green as they come.

My name is Raquel Rolnik. I'm an urban planner,

professor of Urban Planning in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism

of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

And I just hate to drive.

- Watch it! - Whoops.

Didn't see it at all. Oh, I'm a very bad driver, I can tell you.

But there is no public transportation option for me

to come every day to the University.

Sometimes when you are driving, especially in traffic jam,

you say okay, I am going to leave this car here right now

in the middle of this street and I'm going to walk.

I'm going to leave and I want this car to disappear.

And I know that this feeling, a lot of people have this feeling.

But it's impossible. How can you leave your car in the middle of the street?

What's going to happen? So it's impossible, so I would...

I wish I had a car that could disappear overnight.

If the car industry makes something like that, maybe it would be a good solution.

Something that disappears and then appears again.

Riding a bike in São Paulo is a huge challenge.

You need to have a strong will.

Julie was a happy and a very cool girl.

She was killed here in 2011.

She was hit by a bus on Avenida Paulista.

She was on her way to work.

She was a biologist, working with stem cells.

She used to bike calmly, she wasn't aggressive on her bike.

The bus was not in its lane. He squeezed her towards this lane.

Then, another bus ran over her.

When I see the ghost bikes, it's a shock.

Because it reminds me that it's possible to die biking.

It's a possibility and it sucks.

It reminds me that I'm in São Paulo.

When Julie died, we went there to understand what was happening,

why the cyclists get squeezed.

There's a place where the buses start accelerating,

they are able to overtake to get to the bus stop.

The bus driver can't really see the cyclist. It's a blind spot.

It is not the bus driver's or the cyclist's fault.

It's a faulty system that doesn't take people into account.

It's not designed for cyclists or for bus drivers.

The system itself creates this stress.

This is Paulista.

- Here? - Here...

This is the present Paulista.

The lane dimensions allow cars to go 100 km/hour.

Our idea is to reduce the width of the lanes for cars,

and induce a speed of 40-50 km/h.

This way we would gain two meters for a bike lane

and have an avenue with trees.

There would be not only segregation that allows a high traffic volume,

but it would also keep the cyclist safe.

This project is our own initiative.

There's no contract.

Being realistic, if nothing is done within the next 20 years,

it will never be done.

The Traffic Dept. makes adjustments for the flow of cars.

To prevent traffic jams and not to prevent...

...risky situations for people.

The concern is about the flow of cars, it's not about people.

When the car industry became the main industrial sector

for Brazilian industrial development,

urban planning became completely car-oriented.

Brazil decided to leave completely

trains and trams and replace them by cars and busses.

I remember the last major freeway to be built in Southern California,

the only freeway built in my memory is the 105 Freeway.

That freeway was finished in the 1990s.

And I remember, as it was being constructed,

going to a meeting with a couple of bike riders and standing up and saying:

You're pouring all this concrete, can't you just put a bike lane on the side of it?

And literally, people laughed hysterically at us, they thought we were joking.

I really want to jump over this fence.

Here we are standing on the remnants of the old California Cycleway.

The guys who built this, they wanted to get people downtown

efficiently and easily. And when the car came along, everything got squashed.

I mean, here is the Arroyo Seco Parkway,

the first automotive freeway, the one that set the template

that turned Los Angeles into the car capital of the world.

They're just living side-by-side. And this dream of the cycleway here

forgotten, abandoned, closed off by fences.

And it is really not hard to look up and see the tracks above you

and hear the sound of the bicycles against the boardwalk

and imagine what it would be like to be on it today.

The car industry wanted Los Angeles really badly.

They wanted to own Los Angeles, they wanted this freeway system built.

They saw the open road and had this vision of hundreds of miles of freeways.

They had visions of moving people quickly

and that really appealed to people.

They lobbied very hard and General Motors,

through shell companies, bought the bus lines. That was one of the first things.

They slowly took over the mass transit system

and eliminated it in favor of freeways.

Starting around 1945, they begin to remove the trolley system:

The greatest mass transit system ever built in the history of mankind,

spreading across this huge area.

And piece by piece, they begin dismantling it.

And so by 1960, the last trolleys in Los Angeles were taken.

The tracks were torn up, the trolleys were brought out to Santa Monica Bay,

they were thrown into the bay, they sit there now being used as reefs.

All that infrastructure went away in a matter of years

and was replaced by freeways.

So the entire structure of LA is defined

by this desire of the car companies to expand

and to create this illusion of speed and convenience.

The idea of endless traffic jams became attached to Los Angeles really early.

And the early solution was: Too much traffic? Let's widen the freeway.

So you see the Pasadena Freeway going from two lanes, to four, to six.

You see the 5 Freeway going from four to five, to ten, to twelve, in some places.

The problem is always that the more you build,

the more capacity you build for freeways, the more people will ride it.

No matter how much freeway we build and continue to build in Los Angeles,

traffic has gotten worse.

Southern California is bracing itself for epic gridlock.

One of the world's busiest freeways

is about to be shut down for the entire weekend.

All the drivers are getting ready for what they're calling "Carmageddon".

Flying in a helicopter will be the only fast way to get around this weekend.

Because when the 405 is shut down, traffic experts predict total chaos.

For us not to have access to freeways is like the end of the world, it really is.

They're closing ten miles of the 405 Freeway for construction this weekend.

It's going to be chaos.

Anywhere else this might be a minor nuisance,

but the 405 is the busiest,

most legendarily traffic-clogged, highway in America.

Good morning, everybody and thank you for joining us this morning.

Anybody who would decide to have a press conference on the 405

at 9 o'clock in the morning is trying to make a point.

It's paralysis just getting here today. Whoever picked 9 o'clock this morning

dramatized the reality of the gridlock in the west side of Los Angeles,

which is obviously, for all of us on the west side, beyond our acceptance level.

Paul is on that side, I'm on this side,

together, Paul and I go right through the middle of this gridlock situation.

Of course that weekend, the 15th, 16th and 17th,

put it in your calendars now, public, and stay away from the west side

and avoid what will be going on, there is no other way.

It's going to be a really horrendous weekend.

Stay home, stay away, go on vacation.

Avoid the area like the plague.

I've represented this area for 36 years.

I know every short cut over the hill in both directions.

Not one of them is going to work.

A biking city is possible.

A city where people are safe to walk and to ride bicycles.

São Paulo doesn't have a structure for bikes, but it's full of bike riders.

Imagine if there was a structure?

If there were incentives?

Copenhagen is an example for us. A livable city made for people.

It is like a dream to watch something about Copenhagen.

When I read about Denmark or the Netherlands,

it really makes me want to go there someday.

Greater Copenhagen has a population of about 900,000 inhabitants.

It is estimated that there is 1 bicycle registered for every 3 persons.

Consequently, bicycles overrun the city and provide an interesting spectacle

especially for the automobile-conscious American visitors,

who may be of the impression that bicycles in metropolitan cities

are a thing of the past.

And wait...

They're so slow. Come on, my friend.

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

Here we go.

A day in a taxi in Copenhagen

could well be a day in hell if you don't take care,

because of all the bike riders that swarm around you all the time.

It's kind of like a war.

I don't hate bike riders as such.

I even know some, I have friends who are bike riders

and they're kind of nice people.

In Copenhagen we have an estimate of 40% of all citizens

commuting to and from work on bikes.

They even want to increase the number

so they can get more people to ride bikes.

We have a saying here in Denmark:

"If you give Satan a finger, he'll take your whole hand." Right?

They gave them a finger, their own bike lanes, their own traffic signals...

And they even gave them a "green wave" as they call it,

so if you go 20 km/h,

you can just go by green light, by green light, by green light...

When you pamper them like that they just feel like

they can walk on water or something like that.

See here, a guy coming over for red.

And now he is needing to cross for a green light for me.

I don't stop.

Even old ladies who are handicapped.

This guy here, don't know what he is doing but...

...he is actually where I'm supposed to go now.

I guess there is a limit to everybody, right.

You really have to learn.

If you want to survive in this business you really have to learn to let them go.

Copenhagen rush hour.

You've got to be really careful with bikes coming everywhere all the time.

And here they come.

The worst minutes we have in traffic here, bikes coming everywhere,

on my left, on my right, up and down.

They're like insects, swarming everywhere.

Be a nice person, be a good boy scout.

I want to be a good guy, basically.

I was cooped up in a car.

Transporting myself from cooped-up situations,

working behind a computer for years.

I'd forgotten what it was like to, you know, just be out there,

skateboarding or bike riding, things that I did when I was a teenager.

A few years back, I rediscovered it through Midnight Riders,

which is a group social ride that started with eight people.

I was one of those 8 people.

It was pitched as a just an adventure.

The Downtown Fountain Tour, that was our first ride.

People were getting together every month,

planning the route, planning a theme.

Planning the adventure for the night.

And two years later, there was 2,000 people.

People out there made their own flyers, they made their own ride concepts.

And they started branding their own ride. It's like throwing a party.

And I'm interested in

how are we going to keep that wave going until the city changes?

People want to ride bikes in LA.

Here we are at the corner of York Boulevard and Avenue 50.

They call this the York Valley. This is one of the hottest neighborhoods in LA.

The bike lanes were put in over the past few years.

They basically reduced this from four lanes of traffic to two.

This experiment, if it works,

is going to be transferred to a lot of other streets in Los Angeles.

This has really been a controversial spot.

If you hear people argue against this,

like at a community meeting I was at last week,

they'll say "It's a living hell on York Blvd.

It's non-stop traffic, people can't park, the businesses are failing".

Those people have not been here, obviously.

The data says that traffic is moving at basically the same speed.

And as you can see, the street life here has improved.

There's a coffee shop here, there's a new restaurant here,

and it's a lot safer. There are fewer pedestrian accidents,

fewer bike accidents. So those arguments you hear,

they're from people who don't really know what they're talking about.

The engineer who plans to derail the gravy train has rolled in to City Hall.

Rob Ford says he will follow through on those penny-pinching promises

he made during his campaign

and it looks as though Toronto Transit is an early target.

Mayor Rob Ford wasted no time today,

he got right down to business on his first day in office,

and he started with one of the most contentious issues on his agenda.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the war on the car stops today.

When I drive downtown every day coming to City Hall, there's no secret:

The cyclists are a pain in the ass to the motorists.

Let's be quite frank.

Councilor, I remind you of the need to use parliamentary...

I will retract the word ass, but...

What the Mayor meant by the war on the car

is that there are many individuals

who actually want to criticize and attack people

who, through no fault of their own, need a vehicle to go about their business.

There is no secret about it that there is a war on cars in this city.

It's as obvious as the days are long.

Because the cyclists say: I hate you motorists, I can't stand you guys.

They flip you the bird as you're going down Queen Street or down that street...

There's this huge animosity between the motorists and the cyclists.

There's this huge animosity and it's never going to go away.

The Mayor got a large amount of his support from the suburbs

and those families that are individuals that need a car

to live their everyday lives.

We will move to eliminate the 60-dollar car registration tax

at the first council meeting of December, to take effect on January 1, 2011.

For too long, this city has focused on transit only.

And we will not build any more rail tracks down the middle of our streets.

Mayor Ford got elected with a mandate to accomplish many different things.

But one of them was to address the issues

of congestion in traffic and gridlock.

There are some individuals who think that we should all take transit.

If you have a couple of kids and a dog,

you're not going to ask them to get on a bus.

That's an impractical and insensitive arrangement.

People just have to have cars.

The speed humps don't meet the criteria.

You get stop signs, every possible thing to try to put a roadblock

in front of cars in this city is there.

I can't support bike lanes.

How many people are riding outside today?

We don't live in Florida.

We don't have 12 months a year to ride on the bikes.

Laying down, laying it all on the line.

This was all protesters could do to try and stop the removal

of the Jarvis bike lanes.

Doing everything they could to block the machine

that scrubbed away the bike lane marking.

What I compare bike lanes to is swimming with the sharks.

Sooner or later, you're going to get bitten.

And every year we have dozens of people that get hit by cars or trucks.

Well, no wonder...

Roads are built for busses, cars and trucks,

not for people on bikes.

And you know, my heart bleeds for them when I hear someone gets killed,

but it's their own fault at the end of the day.

We have to help the business people in this city.

We are not going to take away parking for bike lanes,

they are taking away parking spots in front of businesses

and businesses are literally going out of business.

The customers have nowhere to park.

I think bicycles are fantastic,

because they're simple.

It's magic. It's magical to me.

It's so different, meeting people on the road compared to when you're in a car.

In a car you become invisible.

There are more people on the streets.

The obstacle, the cultural perception...

You have to keep fighting for people

to change their mentality of:

"Poor people ride bikes and car drivers are rich".

Good morning, kids. How was your morning?

Good!

Miss Milena wants you to pair up.

Ready? You're class 504, right?

- What's your class? - 504!

So pair up.

My students love it when we go out.

Here we have 4-way traffic.

Let's go in groups.

I want to plant a seed in the children.

A sense that they are able to move freely in life.

Doing it in their childhood makes it a habit.

As an adult you never forget it.

We're going that way.

Children, by nature, are not afraid of anything.

It's grownups that imprint fear in them.

Today, horror scenes in one of the most famous avenues in São Paulo.

A cyclist was hit by a car and his arm was torn off.

The arm was caught in the car,

and the driver took off without helping the victim.

It's 5:30 am.

A dramatic scene in the middle of Avenida Paulista.

The young man lying was hit by a car. He was riding a bike to work.

He doesn't seem to realize that his arm was torn off in the accident.

Witnesses said that the driver was speeding and didn't stop the car.

While escaping, the driver realized that the cyclist's arm was in his car.

He drove for 7 km, dropped a friend off,

and going down this street, he decided to get rid of the evidence.

He threw the arm in this creek.

- I hadn't seen this. - Me neither.

She's not picking up. Do you have Sussa's number?

Check, it's in there.

Sussa? Hi. It's Evelyn.

How are you? Are you going to the demonstration today?

This is our city. I don't want to live in London or San Francisco.

I want to live here, I like it here.

If I stopped biking, and used a car, a bus or the metro instead,

there would be one cyclist less exercising their right to bike.

I don't want to be that cyclist less.

Wow, look at all this rain...

Rain is the biggest anti-recruiter in the world.

But not that much, mind you!

But a thousand confirmed on Facebook!

In reality, Facebook is a fake recruiter.

Fewer cars! More love!

Fewer cars! More love!

It's always for a stupid reason, someone drunk, irresponsible.

And the weaker suffer. It's not fair.

What if the driver had lost his arm?

It's not about opinion. It's about respect and being able to live together.

This idea that cars reign supreme here and should be supreme

and should be treated with extra priority...

It's basically the kind of propaganda and bullshit

that the car companies came up with back in the day

and continue to come up with now.

The cost of driving, the cost of parking, is huge.

And asthmatic children and environmental costs

and the rot in our trees, acid rain, global warming...

All these things just so one person can get in the car and drive to work.

It's now 4:30 PM, so we are not during rush time,

and still, nobody can move.

Can you believe what's going to happen at 6 PM, at 7 PM, rush hour.

People will stay 2, 3, 4 hours in the traffic jam.

The new middle class is able to buy their own cars,

which is a very symbolic sign of inclusion.

It's totally useless to have a car, because you cannot go anywhere.

We're stuck in the middle of a traffic jam.

Everybody wants growth, job, money, better salaries, why not?

It's an impossible dream to have this model for all.

It's a lie that was repeated over and over,

that finally, when the market will take over all the planet,

everybody will be happy forever.

I like the idea of car.

I like to drive, to feel the sensation of what a car is supposed to give to you,

that I don't have anymore, in the traffic jam.

I went to the set for a car commercial riding my bike.

It's kind of strange. But life is like this.

It's my job, it's my work.

When I go to shoot, we must be very precise.

I think it's all about who you are

and what kind of car you think represents you better.

Because I think it's kind of a label, you know.

You use a car like a label. I'm like this.

I'm rich. I'm over-rich.

I'm kind of a practical person.

I'm a family person.

I'm... single.

You have a car for all of this.

I'm a woman...

A man...

I'm gay.

I'm ecological.

The world gets fewer smog-forming emissions.

The 3rd generation Prius:

It's harmony between man, nature and machine.

Everything. You can use a car to say it.

Electric cars, smaller cars that have less pollution...

It's a way of the industry to try to recycle into new times.

But this is the affirmation of the old times.

It's not shifting the paradigm,

but reaffirming the paradigm with new technologies.

Half of what I do when I come here is just observe people.

You know that's what marketers do, they watch people:

How they're dressed, what cars they're looking at.

Listen, follow them around and listen to what they're saying.

And so I listen to my kids' friends and the way they talk about cars.

And cars are not as important to them.

You know, Dad's got a Porsche.

Yeah, my dad's got a Porsche, so what? He doesn't care.

It's encouraging to see teenagers here,

because I don't often see teenagers here.

They're going to demand a different way to buy a car, and that's a threat.

And the kind of car they want, we need to make sure the industry adapts.

But you know what? Automotive industry knows how to adapt. They just do.

There's an estimate saying that 40%

of all cars bought in the next 5 or 6 years

will come from a Millennial. That's a lot.

That's a big sea change that we don't expect.

So the demographic change that's happening because of Millennials

is enormous.

Our car market here is 14-15 million... 16 million a year.

The Chinese market is going to get to 25 million pretty quick.

And then 30 as a projection is not that far after that.

30 million cars, twice the size of ours.

It's an amazing market.

It really is going to drive the industry in different ways than we've seen.

As the Brazilian economy is growing

we have a lot of people that didn't have cars before.

In 2001, the market in Brazil was 1.5 million cars a year.

Today it's over three million cars a year.

It's very good to be in a country that you know is going to grow up,

because there are a lot of opportunities.

If you grab them and if I have the right timing,

the right people, the right ideas, the sky is the limit.

So for the next ten years, I'd say,

car sales, it's is a very good business.

2014, we're going to launch the factory

that's going to make a hundred thousand cars a year.

We're going to start with 40,000 a year

and then we're going to increase up to a 100,000 a year.

BRAZILIAN FACTORY 2014

May this be the last ghost bike we ever have to put up.

The issue of the cars is the space that they take.

The other day I was at a small city that is increasing by a 100,000 cars.

Well, a 100,000 cars parked.

They need ten meters each, well, that's one million meters.

They're going to need to build 1,000 km of paved road

just to have those cars parked.

Is that the best way to use our space?

60% of the total built space in the city of São Paulo

was built to house the cars and not the people.

Cars are taking over, not only the public spaces,

they are taking over also private spaces.

Like the replacement of ordinary commercial streets,

replaced by shopping malls.

The shopping center is a model which is absolutely car-dependent.

In order to have cities with sustainable mobility,

where people walk and bike and take public transit,

this is not a technical issue, this is not a financial issue,

it's a political issue.

There are some huge forces.

Why is it that people are doing all of this housing in the suburbs,

where people have to commute for two or three hours?

Because many developers have huge pieces of land that are very inexpensive,

so they make a lot more money using those lands

and having people live far away.

And then putting a lot of pressure on the government

to build roads and to build bridges.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT GIVEN TO POLITICAL PARTIES

CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES: 268 MILLION USD

BIGGEST FUNDERS SINCE 2002

DONATIONS: Camargo Construction Co.

Andrade Gutierrez Construction Co., OAS Construction Co. ...

THE CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES, CAR INDUSTRY AND OIL COMPANIES

ARE THE MAIN FINANCIAL DONORS

SUPPORTING POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS IN BRAZIL

We are here, Unter den Linden, we also call it "Unter den Lobbyisten".

Which translates into "among the lobbyists",

because we have so many lobby offices along the road.

Our data shows German politics has a clear bias

towards the car industry.

I will tell you a story about what that means for the environment.

Here we are, as you've seen, in front of the Mercedes Benz café.

You probably have noticed that Daimler or Mercedes Benz,

they try to present themselves as a sustainable company.

In comparison to all its European competitors,

cars produced by Daimler are the worst in Co2 emissions.

I'm sure you all know these, so-called efficiency labels.

So what do you think this Fiat 500,

where should it be in this list?

A? B? A, B?

What about this car?

Okay, so very low, okay.

And this tank?

Now the solution - surprise, surprise!

The Fiat is F.

Mercedes Benz, it's a large car,

this is B.

And the tank, the battle tank...

This is D.

How does this efficiency label work?

You would think that this shows you the absolute Co2 emissions,

but the calculation is now the emissions per weight.

So if a car is very heavy, it gets a good grade.

The idea of this efficiency label came from a European directive.

Before this European directive had to be implemented in Germany,

the German car lobby, they drafted their own efficiency label.

They presented it to the ministry.

"Look at our draft, this is how it should be done."

So the efficiency label, as we have it now,

it was actually drafted by the car lobby.

I think it's unfair to categorize the auto industry as not wanting to do something.

They of course want to do something. They're parents and mothers and fathers,

they breathe the same air we all breathe.

So if you hear that they're lobbying against it, if you hear they fight it,

they're fighting it because they want to have it happen in a more natural way

and to happen in a more organic way because there was risk to their business.

You have to understand that. And that's why they do what they do.

Don't think they're bad people, don't think they don't want clean air.

Don't think they don't want better fuel economy - of course they do.

You're going to watch over the next 10 to 15 years,

I think we're going to see the automotive industry and a significant transition

from what it was to what it's going to be. But it's always going to have that.

There's always going to be a gasoline engine and we're always going to have it.

It doesn't need to go away, we don't need it to go away.

Hold the plank and walk yourself back. 1, 2, 3, 4, without sticking your bum out.

And back up. That's what we need to do again.

Los Angeles is a city that is controlled by its city council members.

So if you want something done in this district, if you want a freeway expansion,

if you want bike lanes on Figueroa Street. The city councilman

has the power of life and death over you.

There have been 9 fatalities on North Figueroa in 10 years.

If we do not add bike lanes to calm traffic, then what will we do to save lives?

Because this is part of an ongoing conversation,

I want to be positive and constructive. We had another meeting last month.

I think all of us have to be honest, we didn't do so well on the dialogue.

Unless we say Jerry Springer is the type of dialogue we want to have.

So I'm looking up how much our local city councilman got from Chevron.

He received, over the past few years,

11,000 dollars in direct contributions from Chevron.

Chevron spent a 1.8 million dollars

on lobbying to defeat an anti-global warming bill.

Chevron's interest is to see more freeways built,

to keep the number of cars going,

they own more gas stations than anyone else in Southern California,

to not have environmental regulations on their refineries,

and to generally make sure they have someone friendly on their legislature.

As I was asked before what amount of deaths are acceptable

in comparison to speed. I mean.

I lost my wife...

You want to ask me a question of what's acceptable

in terms of somebody's death?

Zero. That's our goal. Zero.

Until he came into power, it was very unusual

for these kind of corporate interests to interfere in LA City Council elections.

As the city council is a very local job.

And it involves helping local people.

There is no question in my mind that that money will be used

when he makes the decisions to whether we going to build new freeways

and build bike lanes.

I cannot imagine the oil companies do not expect

a payback on their investment.

So thank you everybody, enjoy your evening, drive home safely,

and we look forward to talking to you again. God bless everybody.

I believe that the car industry

has spun a web that has caught the public and the politicians

that is very hard to break.

Quiet!

- He speaks for the Mayor! - Quiet!

My dad is upstairs resting. It's Sunday...

Ask him to come down. We need to talk to him!

He promised to see us.

This is a precedent. Choose a group of representatives,

and he will meet them. But not at his house, on a Sunday...

When we start talking about closing down car industries,

we are talking about shifting completely the economic model of development.

I'm talking about a very broad coalition between unions and business.

And their lobby, their participation in the power structure

and in the decision-making of policies of the country.

That's why it's so difficult to change things.

We all say different things, we're not organized.

We must have a letter, a manifesto, to deliver to the Mayor...

We need to organize, get articulated, otherwise...

You know what will happen? He'll talk to a few of us,

and say: "I've talked to the cyclists."

And then what? Who is who here? We don't have any representatives.

It's all about representation.

Could we go for a coffee? It's cold.

We're reaching a point where it's impossible to live.

In São Paulo, the hospitals are filled with children

and elderly people who are sick from air pollution.

It's a pity that people don't see that it's an endless black hole

and that everybody is going down.

I think the cities are collapsing.

There's not much we can do.

It's very difficult to reverse because cities are based on money.

Which other industry has the money to face the car industry?

I don't know of any.

In seven more years, from one billion to two billion cars.

What is that? A disaster.

And you don't need a crystal ball

in order to see how much it will be a disaster.

You just go to Mumbai, you go to Jakarta, you go to São Paulo,

or any big city and you can see for yourself

the situation where a car-oriented policy could lead: Nowhere!

The reality is that there is not one city in the world, medium-size or large,

that has solved the issue of mobility through the private car. None.

And there is absolutely certainty that having more highways

and more flyovers is not going to solve the issue of traffic congestion.

We are at a very exciting time and we need to develop a sense of urgency.

Because the population is going to grow

another two and a half or three billion people.

Whatever we do or don't do is going to be there for hundreds of years.

So we need to decide: How do we want to live?

...painted my soul gray

but they didn't dry my eyes

Buckled up my chest...

The traffic jam is the solution.

Before the traffic became so bad,

it was very difficult to argue for alternative modes of transportation.

They put that knife in my chest...

Because of the traffic jam, it's much more easy to overcome

this hegemonic mode of organizing cities

towards a paradigm shift that includes bikes and public transportation.

But also new ways of building our cities.

I think 50 years of experience shows us

that you cannot make life better in the city by making more room for cars.

LA has been the absolute worst polluted city

9 out of 10 years for the past 5 decades.

And the only way to make it change is to reduce the number of cars.

The only way to genuinely reduce cars

is to make it more expensive to have cars.

Which means reducing the number of car lanes,

reducing the amount of parking,

increasing the prices, and adding toll roads.

And really making cars bear the cost to society that they actually create.

The citizens cannot be spectators of how the cities grow.

The citizens need to participate and develop a sense of urgency

and pressure the politicians to make the right decisions.

Hello! So you came!

Another round today!

- What's today's agenda? - Money, money, money...!

Driving cars doesn't work anymore.

We've got to have alternatives. One of them is investing in cycling.

It's crucial that City Council invests money in cycling,

and that the projects get going.

We have to go through the budget again

because of the debt limit of the city.

Everything is more complicated now and takes more time.

It's going to be twice as hard.

But we haven't abandoned this project, we are working on it.

There is optimism. The new mayor at least is open to having a dialogue.

But you know, that doesn't change the city.

As we say in Brazil, you've got to have balls.

In 2011 they were shutting down the 405, which is the busiest freeway in the world.

And true to the culture of disaster which Los Angeles seems to be obsessed with,

they called it Carmageddon. And they just drilled into us

what a nightmare this was going to be shutting down this freeway.

Think of China and what you've seen on TV,

where they have nine-day long traffic closures on their freeways.

It's going to be like that for two days.

The only way we get through this is by everyone staying far away.

That Friday night they shut down the freeway

and the next morning, on Saturday, we woke up and we went outside.

And it was... It was Utopia.

I took my bike out and I hit empty streets.

Everybody was so scared of Carmageddon that they...

...they stayed home or they commuted to work via public transportation.

People stayed local, at night they ate in local restaurants, they walked places.

And the streets were clean and open.

I really wanted to put my bike on the 405 Freeway and ride on the 405.

I rode my bike up Santa Monica Blvd and then I headed north

alongside the 405, past Pico.

And there was kind of a more furtive ramp there.

And there was a police car there.

So I kind of got disheartened but I rode around

and about after 1 AM, I started coming back.

I went back by that ramp and nobody was there.

So I took my bike and I put it over the blockage to the ramp.

And I got up on this freeway and it was amazing.

It was expansive and vast.

For the first time, up on that freeway, I felt like this massive infrastructure,

this miracle of human engineering, was also built for me.

One day, we woke up and everybody on the Internet was like: "Yay!"

"Downtown, bicycles!"

The combined effects of a new mayor and a strong bicycle movement...

...led to a plan to instate 400 km of bike lanes.

And now it's happening.

City Hall with the red carpet right in front of it.

Who would have believed that? It's really crazy.

Who would have guessed?

Cool.

I think more and more people in LA are coming to love the bicycle.

I don't think it will ever be the dominant form of transportation,

but more and more people are realizing it's the best form of transportation.

Even people who might never ride a bike say to me:

I wish I had the nerve to ride a bike.

It is a shift in paradigm, at least. It is time to rethink...

For car owners, now it's time to share.

You own a car, not the street.

The street belongs to all of us.

This is not a war.

It's a city.

This is a one-way street, actually. But not for bikes.

It's gorgeous!

To the left, guys!

Here's another really cool map of the cycleway...

Thanks for the day, guys. Take care.

Green light means go.

Excuse me, Mr. Policeman. Good morning.

ONE CAR LESS