Cycling cities

Cycling has many socio-economic, health, and environmental benefits that its promotion should be a logical policy choice. And while most cities are choking under ever-increasing motor traffic, more and more policymakers wish they could turn their city into a ‘Cycling City’.

This policy brief helps turn these dreams into reality with good practices, guidance, and recommendations backed by real-life examples from European cities and regions. It is common knowledge that countries like Denmark and the Netherlands are cycling leaders in Europe, and it would be easy to fill this policy brief with examples and good practices from these two front-runner countries alone.

However, excellence, especially when it is too far from one’s own reality, can be discouraging and hard to relate to, and while it is always a joy to look at the next great project to support biking in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, the authors have decided to focus on good practices from regions and cities that are catching up, to show that it is very much possible today to set the goal of becoming a Cycling City within the next decade, and achieve this with concrete steps and visible impacts even in the short term of one political mandate.