Good practice:

Lecce Bike to Work Day

The cities in Puglia, small in terms of extension and usually in flat territories, are well suited to the change of mobility combined with a real change of mentality. Promoting the use of bicycles in systematic home-work journeys instead of private cars becomes a possible action with the involvement of workers residing in the city where they work.

The BIKE TO WORK campaign experimented in the city of Lecce, starting from 2015 with the exception of 2020 due to the COVID emergency, has shown how a certain number of people would almost unconsciously switch from car to bike use i.e., to a form of sustainable mobility, through the adoption of a playful form of the team competition (even individuals) between the workers. Through the use of a kilometre recording app (Google, Koomot, Strava, etc.), the route taken by individual participants in a team/company is recorded and rankings are formed with awarding of the first team. The same thing goes for individual workers.

The BIKE TO WORK campaign started in 2015 with 3 teams of workers (CNR, MPS, Unisalento) and a dozen participants up to an increase each year, both individual and team participants, involving a total of about fifty people.
Participants to be reached are employees of public administrations, post offices, banks, the industrial sector, commerce etc. favouring those public and private companies with a higher number of employees.

The use of a kilometre recording app is necessary for the successful implementation of the practice. Apart from human resources in charge of logistical organization, approximately 2000 € were needed for the design and printing of 70x100 posters and A4 playbills.

Starting in 2015 with the first edition with 3 teams and a dozen participants, MO. BICI aps managed to expand both the number of individual and team participants up to fifty. The good practice is scalable to get large numbers.

Problems in dissemination and advertising on local and regional mass media to reach more participants.

The same practice can be activated at a supra-municipal or supra-regional level, for example, as a tournament between European cities. The possibility of transferring this practice is very high but help is needed in the form of an institutional partnership that believes in this practice and disseminates it through their information channels by sending invitations to participate in public and private companies in order to reach a higher number of participants. The use of bicycles to go to work in Italy is now also protected by INAIL which covers the risk of accidents on home-work journeys.