A photo taken in central Baku that circulated on social media on December 19 shocked many locals. It showed a new bicycle lane being drawn along Independence Street, near the capital's old neighborhood, Ichari Shahar. 

Baku isn't a total stranger to bike lanes - in recent years the local government started marking bicycle paths in central parts of the capital. But before they were cleaved off from the sidewalks, not the roadways themselves - hardly in line with the ideals of a people-oriented city. Now, an entire car lane has been sacrificed to make way for a two-way bicycle lane and a buffer zone. 

Although the news was welcomed by bloggers advocating for people-oriented cities, many motorists expressed opposition. "Roads are getting narrower day by day. Traffic is getting worse. We will have to move from the center to somewhere else," one Facebook user wrote. 

A few days later, on the last working day of 2023, Baku's master plan, laying out the city's development priorities until 2040, was approved by the government. Bike lanes were one of the many action points. 

"The main goal of the project is to transform Baku, which is currently a monocentric agglomeration, into a multicentric and sustainable city, to create favorable conditions for the sustainable development of new priority areas of the capital's economy," read the statement by the State Committee for Urban Planning and Architecture, which oversaw the master plan. 

The committee commissioned the German development company AS+P to draft the plan, whose priorities are listed as the city's sustainable development, the regeneration of the environment, architectural esthetics, care for historical heritage, and a new city economy. The plan estimates the city's transformation will cost 93.6 billion manats (about $55 billion), 60.5 billion manats of which is planned to come from the state budget and the rest to be financed through private investments. 

The first master plan for Baku was prepared in 1898. Since then, the city has had only four plans - not counting the current one. The last one, approved in 1986 under the Soviet Union, covered a timeline up to 2005. For 18 years, the capital grew bigger without a master plan at hand. 

(The World Bank and the Azerbaijani government also financed a project called the Regional Development Plan for Greater Baku, which was never realized.) 

Even before its last master plan expired, Baku already witnessed force majeure events. In the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia and IDPs from Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions arrived in the capital to seek shelter. Over the years, some of them received government-provided housing on the city's outskirts, others built their own houses, and others still live in old student dormitories in deplorable conditions. 

Since the country's victory over Armenia in the 2020 Second Karabakh War, the government has been rebuilding the regained territories and slowly resettling IDPs in their former hometowns. However, there have been concerns over whether many of the IDPs actually want to go back, given the uncertainty around employment opportunities. 

In addition, huge swathes of people migrated from other parts of the country to the capital to seek stable employment. Baku's official population was just over 2.3 million as of January 2023. But this is only the number of people who are registered as residents. Because there is little data on the large numbers of people who have migrated from rural areas, unofficial estimates put the current population at as much as 5 million. That's out of a national population of around 10 million. Seventy percent of all the cars in the country are driven in the capital. 

To accommodate everyone, countless apartment buildings and houses popped up in Baku over the years in a sporadic and irregular fashion. Local experts now believe that it is far too late for Baku to redeem itself with a master plan. "Baku is already so overburdened that if any new urban plan is prepared, mass demolitions must be carried out for its realization: And this will cost the budget billions," one property expert told RFE/RL's Azerbaijani service. 

Along with dense population and irregular construction, Baku's traffic jams, poor public transportation, and vanishing green space all regularly come in for criticism. 

Apart from bike lanes, the plan envisages bringing back Baku's long-abandoned and dismantled tram system (the previous tram was shut down in 2004), widening pedestrian zones, more subway stations, the building of a university campus, among other things. 

Some of the plan's initiatives seem far-fetched. The problem with Baku's promised trams, for instance, is that when the old tram system was dismantled, all the cables and rails were removed, and there has been subsequent construction on their routes. "Today all that infrastructure is destroyed. What are they going to demolish so that they can rebuild it?" asked transportation expert Ilgar Huseynli in an interview with RFE/RL. "That alone will take until 2040." 

One concern about the bicycle lanes is that they will be essentially useless if they are drawn haphazardly around the city, without a central plan. A representative of Azerbaijan Ground Transportation Agency told urban blogger Anar Aliyev that wherever possible, the lanes will be connected. 

The drawing of new bicycle lanes continues in places that up to now have served as unofficial parking lots. 

The new plan addresses the problem of the city's vanishing green space but only to a small degree. The World Health Organization's ideal green space per capita in urban areas is 50 square meters, with a recommended minimum of nine square meters per capita. In Baku that figure is only seven square meters. Green space occupies an average of 41 percent of European capital cities but a mere 5 percent of Baku.

In the new master plan, that figure is expected to reach 10 percent.