A video and pictures emerged this morning showing Beirut Mayor Jamal Itani biking to the municipality’s building in Beirut. It’s a nice publicity stunt of course but I have two comments:

1- The video is showing him biking right next to the municipality. Why didn’t they make it a bit longer to show that he’s biking from his house?
2- Why isn’t he using the bike lane that was introduced recently?

On another note, I’ve seen already cars and scooters driving over the bike lane in the last couple of weeks so it doesn’t look like it’s gonna work out unless municipal policemen are deployed to keep the lane clear and that bikers eventually start using it.

In all cases, let’s hope things improve with time and Beirut does become a bike-friendly city because it’s really not that hard to achieve.