Good practice:

City Cycling (STADTRADELN)

The campaign contributes to climate protection and sets an example to promote cycling in municipalities. As the local decision-makers for cycling infrastructure, local politicians should experience first-hand what it means to cycle in their own municipality and help to initiate and implement measures to improve the situation for cyclists. The CITY CYCLING campaign is designed as a competition to promote cycling. The most active local parliaments and municipalities are sought – as are the most active teams and cyclists in the municipalities themselves. Members of local parliaments are invited to form teams with citizens and to compete to top the leader board. Ideally, they should act as team captains for CITY CYCLING teams to set a positive example to encourage citizens to cycle more. During the 21 consecutive days, as many journeys as possible should be covered by bike – for both private and professional purposes. School classes, clubs, organisations, companies and local inhabitants are also all invited to form teams. During the three-week campaign period, cyclists record the kilometres they cover in an environmentally friendly manner in their online cycling log, a web-based database for logging the kilometres cycled.

No financial means or resources are required, except for a participation fee depending on the size of the municipality. Apart from a coordinator, no human resources are tied up. Citizens, politicians and municipal employees can participate in the programme with their mobile, internet or pen & paper

A total of 1127 municipalities took part in the urban cycling programme in 2019. More than 400,000 cyclists registered, 7,000 parliamentarians of various levels participated and almost 77,800,000 kilometres were cycled through all participants. In total, more than 11,000 tons of CO2 could be avoided.

The campaign should be institutionalized within the municipality, meaning a certain department/position should be responsible in order to guarantee continuity over the years. Also, the coordinator needs to fulfil the function as motivator for all the teams within a municipality.

The potential for transferability to other regions is estimated to be high. Replication of this Climate Alliance campaign is inherent in its concept: the participating municipalities replicate CITY CYCLING at the local level. Overall, municipalities can draw a lot of lessons from city cycling as how to engage people into cycling and therefore, to advocate mobility change and climate protection.
With the use of the CITY CYCLING-App, coordinators receive an anonymised profile of their citizen’s mobility use and can therefore use these dates to plan their infrastructure.