Enrique Penalosa is one of three persons sharing this year's City of Gothenburg's Award for Sustainable Development. He received the prize in part for his role in starting the large BRT system Transmilenio in Bogot, Colombia.

Enrique Penalosa

The City of Gothenburg's Award for Sustainable Development is celebrating its tenth anniversary. It was established to encourage positive development and to recognize strategic work for sustainable development. The total prize is SEK 1 million. Previous award winners include the US presidential candidate Al Gore.

This year, initiatives for sustainable development in the world's fastest growing cities were recognized. This is where 75 percent of the world's energy is consumed, and it is also the origin of 80 percent of climate-affecting emissions.

In addition to Enrique Penalosa, the award is shared by Dr. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, head of Habitat, the UN's program for human settlements, and Soen Hermansson, who headed work on making the Danish island Sams?self-supporting with renewable energy.

Enrique Penalosa was the mayor of Bogota from 1998 to 2001. According to the jury, he succeeded during these years in transforming Colombia's capital, one of the world's most chaotic urban environments with slums and poor air, into a model of sustainable and democratic city planning.
A large part of this work involved improving the traffic situation in the city. Penalosa built what is the world's longest bike path to date and enhanced the popular ciclovia, which means that vehicle traffic on long stretches of road is banned every Sunday between 7:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. in an effort to promote pedestrian and bike traffic.

The most important initiative, however, was to reform public transport by starting Transmilenio, which has now been developed into one of the world's largest and most effective BRT systems.

The system consists largely of four bus lanes through the city that allow certain buses to stop at each bus stop, while express buses can pass in the outer lane without being hindered by stopping buses. These are articulated buses with a high passenger capacity. The bus stops are designed for boarding and alighting, and a telematics system helps both operators and passengers to have full control over traffic.

Volvo Buses is the largest supplier of buses to Transmilenio. Five of the six operators in the system together operate nearly 600 Volvo buses, including ten double-articulated buses, which were recently taken into service and are intended to further increase efficiency in the system.