Here in Brazil you see a lot of people moving from cars/bus to bicycles. I think a number of factors contributed to that: First and foremost, following the com

Here in Brazil you see a lot of people moving from cars/bus to bicycles. I think a number of factors contributed to that: First and foremost, following the commodities boom there was also a boom in car sales in Brazil, but not a boom in car lanes. Government is spectacularly inefficient around here, specially when it comes to building and maintaining roads. Traffic has worsen considerably in the last decade, and all attempts from most cities of creating new passageways and tunnels ended up in streets closed for construction for several years, the constructions being stagnated by the inherit inefficiency of our government and later on by the lack of money once the crisis hit. Here in Porto Alegre there are various of those constructions with no one working on them, just making traffic worse. The BRT project is half dead and buses need to get out of the bus lane where it's under reform and go in the middle of the cars then back to the bus lanes. There are at least four main access roads near the bus station closed for reform. Not to mention the new bridge of which the construction has been stopped, or the tunnels that for years do not progress. Anyway, that rant aside, the whole "green" vibe around bikes is probably a huge factor too. So you have this transportation which is clean, healthy, faster than a car in some parts of town, and relatively cheap. Then, cities started to "build" bike lanes (actually just paint part of the car lane adjacent to the sidewalk and call it a bike lane, which made traffic even worse). I think that turned what was an increase in the number of cyclists into a boom in the last years.