CITY CYCLING is a competition that involves completing as many daily journeys as possible in an environmentally-friendly manner using your bike over a 21-day period. Whether you ride every day or cycled only rarely until now. Every kilometre counts – and even more so if you would have completed the journey by car otherwise.
We believe that by far the most effective way to convince someone to cycle is not to merely reel off its countless benefits. Instead they should get on a bike for themselves for 21 days.
The competition statistics show just how many people are already using their bike and thus contributing to climate protection. In order to encourage even more people to switch permanently from their car to a bike, we need cycling infrastructure that allows them to reach their destination quickly and safely.
To help draw attention to cyclists’ needs, CITY CYCLING also targets local politicians. After all, it is them who makes the decisions when it comes to the cycling infrastructure – and thus to the practical local climate protection. During the campaign period, they take the handlebar perspective to find out for themselves where their municipality already caters to cyclists’ needs well and where there is still room for improvement.
Municipalities can use our RADar! citizen participation platform to draw on citizens’ expertise – as the real experts for cycling – to make targeted improvements to the local cycling infrastructure. Cyclists report potholes, abrupt ends to cycle paths or confusing routing on a digital city map for their municipality to take care of. The CITY CYCLING app can also aid in the local bicycle traffic planning: the routes tracked by the CITY CYCLING app are anonymised and evaluated by the Technical University in Dresden (TU Dresden). The findings – for example, where people cycle the most and how quickly, or where traffic flow slows – can be made available to municipalities.
For many decades, car traffic was the only relevant category in the mobility sector. To reduce traffic-related environmental damage, this must now change! Since the transition to more environmentally-friendly modes of transport begins in people’s heads, we wish to draw greater attention to cycling in the public discourse. CITY CYCLING thus creates opportunities for communication locally within the municipalities as well as nationally.