Drenthe : Hembrow holidays This story is part of our youReport series. Nigel has just returned from a great week cycling around the Drenthe area of the Netherlands, care of Hembrow Cycling Holidays. He says: I am still gobsmacked about how the Dutch have really got their act together on so many levels. Liveable towns and cities. Public transport well sorted (just love those double-decker trains). Not to mention the cycling… what with seemingly everyone using bikes from cradle to grave. Almost literally – I hear that one of the common causes of cycling casualties is old people dropping dead[…]
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Katja reports about cycling access
Germany : access all areas This story is part of our youReport series. It is common in German towns and cities to provide widespread pedestriansation in centres. City centres in Germany seem to be alive, teeming with people, shopping or whiling their time away, enjoying the atmosphere and surroundings. It is also common to provide a fair amount of cycling access… The photos below show some examples from North Germany that I have collated over the past years. It covers Braunschweig, Wolfenbüttel, Hanover and Bremen (in no particular order). This comes highly topical at a time when we managed to[…]
Read moreFarah reports from Paris
Paris : mon dieu, doing pretty well This story is part of our youReport series. I’m not an expert when it comes to the cycling infrastructure but when I went to Paris a few months ago, I was pretty impressed by how cycle-friendly it was and I even spotted a few things that weren’t probably there a couple of years ago. So looks like the French are catching up and actually, in the Copenhagenize index 2013 of bike friendly cities, Paris is 14th, between Budapest and Hamburg. Not bad at all! The back streets are quiet and equipped with contra-flows,[…]
Read moreKatja reports from “Harz und Heide”
Braunschweig : Contraflows This story is part of our youReport series. The city of Braunschweig, Lower Saxon in northern Germany, with its 250,000 resident sits comfortably mid-field in the 2012 Fahrradklima-Test (cycling barometer) – the German cycle city ranking. It struck me when I moved to the UK how much we allow roads to be overpowered by car use. In my home town Braunschweig (Brunswick) in northern Germany roads appear to have more of a purpose and inner-city roads seem be split into two types: • roads for cars (vehicle movement) and these will have bicycle provision on them, cycle[…]
Read moreTony reports from the Netherlands
Enschede : pedal in paradise This story is part of our youReport series. Tony says “It’s like cycling through paradise – Ijmuiden to Enschede.” It’s the Netherlands. Naturally. Off on the ferry and on his party went. Tony begins: It is wonderful to find so many traffic free routes. And in the towns, there is invariably a cycle route which usually includes a lane either on or beside the road – and at junctions, priority is given to the bike. Most of the paths we followed were dedicated to cycles though sometimes motor scooters are allowed. Between towns, the paths[…]
Read moreRuss reports from Hanover
Hanover : cycle and walking spaces This story is part of our youReport series. With Germany 5th in the ECF’s Bike Barometer, Hanover (German: Hannover) ranks in 6th place of the German cities of a population > 200,000 – according to ADFC (German CTC) Fahrradklimatest. They seem to be doing well. Russ starts by putting things into some context: Hanover is the capital of Lower Saxony – roughly 1/2 a million live, work and play there. We got off at Central Station onto an huge open space where people on foot, people on bikes and trams mingle quite successfully and[…]
Read moreClaire reports from Assen
Assen : bicycle priority This story is part of our youReport series. When – exactly a year ago to the day – Claire wrote a comprehensive report for the Cycle Embassy of Great Britain it not just resulted in local newspaper reporting on her journey to a better cycling city. Her photos still remind us today what happens when ‘cycling goes Dutch’. Claire came back with a lot of knowledge thanks to the study tour organised by Hembrow Cycling Holidays. Let’s focus on priority that is afforded to cycling. And how it works. Photo 1 – Crossing in residential area[…]
Read moreJames reports from Sevilla
Seville : The fourth best cycle city in the world! This story is part of our youReport series. UPDATED 17 June 2013 WITH INFO RECEIVED FROM @BicicletasSibus – THANKS FOR GETTING IN TOUCH! I am living in Seville over the summer for work reasons and have been cycling around the city for almost two months, James reports. It has been interesting to compare Seville with Newcastle/Tyneside, especially as they have a similar population (Tyneside 1.65 million, Seville 1.52 million – according to wikipedia anyway). Here’s a brief overview of a few different aspects of cycling en Sevilla! Copenhagenize named Seville[…]
Read moreRichard reports from Bremen
Bremen : Learning and teaching This story is part of our youReport series. Our partners Beauty and the Bike, aka Richard and Beatrix, welcomed members of Cambridge Cycling Campaign. As Richard describes, it was a tour to highlight Bremen’s cycling infrastructure and we started by explaining, that every red line on this map represents a cycle path – so that every busy, main road has a cycle path alongside it. I know, this is something that campaigners in the UK can only dream of. Yet it is now built into the DNA of Bremen (though not all German) traffic planners.[…]
Read moreGeorge reports from Vienna
Vienna : VeloCity 2013 This story is part of our youReport series. Just in time for the conference „The Sound of Cycling – Urban Cycling Cultures“ http://velo-city2013.com/ June 11-14 2013 for world-renowned cycling visionaries to gather in Vienna … I had the opportunity for a quick working weekend/holiday in Vienna. So here is my observations over just three days in May, George reports. Vienna seems a great place to cycle with cycle tracks from the city centre to the suburbs. The old town, inside the Inner Ring Road (built where the original medieval town walls stood), is fairly compact and[…]
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