Urban Cycling: What Makes a City Cycle According to Pucher and Buehler

Urban cycling is the use of the bicycle as everyday transport, to get to work, school or the shops, and it has become the most efficient mobility solution cities know: it moves more people per metre of street than any other mode except the metro, emits nothing, makes no noise, improves the health of the rider and costs a fraction of any motorised infrastructure. The researchers John Pucher, of Rutgers University, and Ralph Buehler, of Virginia Tech, have gathered the worldwide evidence in City Cycling (2012) and Cycling for Sustainable Cities (2021), and their conclusion is simple: people cycle where it is safe and comfortable to do so, and that depends on public policy decisions.

Why some countries cycle and others do not: the international comparison

International comparison is their starting point. In the Netherlands around a quarter of all trips are made by bicycle, in Denmark close to a fifth, in Germany around a tenth; in the United States, the United Kingdom or Spain, barely one to three percent. The difference is not climate, topography or culture but infrastructure and regulation: Dutch and Danish cities built from the 1970s networks of lanes separated from traffic, protected junctions, parking and 30 km/h streets, and penalised the car with expensive parking and streets closed to through traffic. Where the same was done later, as in Seville, which went from under one percent to over six in five years after building 120 kilometres of protected lanes between 2006 and 2010, the result repeated itself.

The ingredients of a cycling network according to Pucher and Buehler

Pucher and Buehler identify the ingredients. Physically separated lanes on main roads, because paint does not protect and most of the population will not cycle among cars. Calm 30 km/h streets in neighbourhoods, where the bicycle can share safely. Junctions designed to make the cyclist visible and give them priority. Secure parking at stations, schools and buildings. Integration with public transport for long trips. And education and rules that hold the driver of the heavier vehicle responsible. Without the full combination, each isolated piece delivers little.

Safety in numbers, bike share and e-bikes

Safety is the decisive factor and has a counter-intuitive property that Peter Jacobsen documented in 2003: the more people cycle, the fewer crashes per cyclist, because drivers expect to encounter them and adjust their behaviour. That safety-in-numbers effect explains why the cities with the most bicycles are the safest to cycle in and why fear, more than distance, is what holds urban cycling back where infrastructure is missing. Bike-share systems, from Paris's Vélib in 2007, and electric bicycles, which extend the radius and flatten the hills, have also widened the potential public to ages and physical conditions previously left out.

Measured benefits, limits and conditions

The benefits are quantified. Every kilometre cycled instead of driven saves emissions, noise and space, and public health studies estimate that the benefits of physical activity far outweigh the risks of crashes and exposure to pollution. Copenhagen calculates a net social benefit for every kilometre cycled and a net cost for every kilometre driven, and bases its investments on that calculation. Paris, which has built hundreds of kilometres of lanes since 2015 and removed parking, has seen the bicycle overtake the car in trips within the city.

Pucher and Buehler warn of the limits and conditions. The bicycle does not replace public transport on long trips or in dispersed regions; it complements it. Infrastructure must reach peripheral and low-income neighbourhoods, where it is most needed and least often built, so that cycling does not become the privilege of gentrified centres. And the change requires taking space and priority from the car, which is where the politics is decided. Their lesson is that urban cycling is not a matter of culture but of design, and that any city that builds the complete network will see its people use it.