Safe cycling in the cities of the Danube area

From 2020 to 2022, nine countries participated in an Interreg project to improve the safety of those who use bicycles to get around in everyday life or for leisure. Two years of research to promote the use of bicycles while reducing the number of casualties

A look at the list of "don't"s, and the outcome of Sabrina , an Interreg project on the safety of cycling in the Danube area, demonstrates that it has fully hit the mark, managing to get closer to the sad reality: from Slovakia to Croatia, from Austria to Bulgaria, and in all nine countries examined, a rather bleak and at times disturbing current picture unfortunately reflects the majority of those "bad practices" collected in two years of interviews, workshops and analyses. In summary: the safety of those who travel by bike is not paid due attention.

Extending the analysis to all road mobility, Ferdinand Smith, president of EuroRAP, the EU body for road safety, also said this at the opening conference  of the Sabrina project in October 2020: “The Covid pandemic has distracted us from another pandemic and from the fact that every day in the world more than 3,700 people lose their lives in traffic”.

This was echoed by Matthew Baldwin, deputy director general of the European Commission, European coordinator of road safety, who reeled off the same figures: "Every year, every year, we have more than a million casualties, and in the EU alone there are 23,000 (of which more than 2000 cyclists), not to mention the 135,000 seriously injured".

Too many dead and injured on the road

The launch of the Sabrina project, focused on the safety of cycling mobility, chose a very particular circumstance in the autumn of 2020, which brought together online over 250 road safety experts and representatives of the sector as well as of the transportation sector from more than 40 countries from all over the world: the second decade of action for road safety proclaimed by the UN in August 2020  had just opened, with the aim of reducing the number of deaths and injuries caused by traffic by at least 50%.

The Sabrina project is aimed at the most fragile users, pedestrians and cyclists, who risk obstructing each other; vehicles of different sizes and speeds, which seem to compete for space on the road; managers and administrators, rescuers and those in charge of maintenance.

And for everyone, the "don't"s are a priceless decalogue, which emerged from hundreds of contacts with the most diverse actors in all nine countries involved in the project. “Without exception – we read in one of Sabrina's final documents – the participants in the consultation identified situations and behaviours that undermine the safety of cycling infrastructures”. These are actions "possibly to be avoided in the future", but all things that currently happen all over the world.

These include, for example, one-off measures taken "just because perhaps there is some paint or cement left over"; glossy brochures created with declarations of principle without first consulting the main players; cycle paths designed without clear connections with the existing road network (“A cycle path in the middle of nowhere will never be used”); risky political choices, such as the lack of a strategy; the use of too many compromises or the absence of specifically delegated and coordinating bodies; practical decisions to avoid, such as forcing pedestrians and cyclists into the same spaces, changing the typology of intersections, neglecting infrastructure maintenance and "perhaps taking Amsterdam and Copenhagen as models" without taking into account the different situations.

The analysis obviously included the examination of data on accidents involving bicycles, and a first gap emerged precisely in the availability of disaggregated numbers: there are general data, according to which, for example, in the EU 2160 cyclists lose their lives every year ( as in 2018), while 262,000 suffered serious consequences from an accident between 2010 and 2018.

Sabrina would have liked to promote more detailed data collection, which would include, for example, all accidents, even those that do not involve health or insurance consequences. But the objective is difficult in all nine countries involved - Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova, Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, an area where in any case the proportion of cyclist deaths in relation to the population is higher than in the rest of the European Union.

Except for individual examples of specific monitoring (such as in Prague and Hungary), accidents involving bicycles are not recorded as a separate category, and less serious incidents do not appear in the statistics.

Protect, but also educate, cyclists

It should be noted that Sabrina's focus on the safety of cyclists concerns any type of route, from cycle paths to roads with reserved lanes, from routes shared with pedestrians to carriageways where the presence of bicycles is simply indicated as a possibility, without there being curbs or horizontal signs: among road users, cyclists are the most vulnerable, and their safety must be protected by avoiding conflicts, competition and contrasts with other road users as much as possible, read the final recommendations.

In fact, for Sabrina the bike is not just a tool for leisure and sport, but in all respects a convenient means of transport (you spend from 175 to 300 Euros a year compared to 2500-8500 for a car), with a low social impact (one kilometre of urban travel by car costs 37 cents of public funds, compared to 29 for buses, while the same journey by bike produces a public benefit of 68 cents) and with high advantages for the environment (1 kg is saved of carbon dioxide every 7 kilometres traveled by bike instead of by car).

The savings in terms of time, space and noise are notable: in an urban street three and a half metres wide, 7 times more bikes than cars pass in an hour, and a parked car occupies the area of ​​15 bikes. Therefore, aware that the same road user is from time to time a motorist, cyclist, pedestrian, bus passenger or train traveller, mobility managers will have to look at all users and - also considering the positive effects on physical and mental health, and the accessibility of the medium regardless of income - promoting multimodality.

The solution, according to Sabrina's studies, lies in the combination of multiple means of transport and in offering a journey that is either shorter or more convenient or safer or all three compared to that by car. According to research conducted in the Netherlands, 83% of train journeys are multimodal journeys, and 44% of commuters who use the train cycle to the station from home and/or cycle to work from home.

Hence the need to provide not only road infrastructure (be it cycle paths or highlighted lanes), but also actions and services, such as guarded car parks, rental or sharing of two-wheelers, ease of transport of bicycles by train, exemptions for transport of the foldable ones.

From prohibitions to recommendations

Thanks to the plurality of subjects involved by Sabrina, the solutions suggested are the result of a meticulous risk analysis: in addition to the project partners (from the University of Zagreb to the Moldovan Automobile Club, from the Slovenian Ministry of Infrastructure to foundations, companies, consortia and municipalities in different countries), the consultation involved several dozen bodies in the sector, such as the European Cyclists Federation, the Austrian Environment Agency, the Pula tourist office and the Automobile Club in Croatia, several universities and municipalities in Bulgaria, an urban design firm in the Czech Republic, the Hungarian Cycle Tourism Association, the Polytechnic University of Bucharest and the Bratislava regional government in Slovakia.

This variety of approaches has given depth to the proposed solutions, which are widely shared and therefore perhaps more convincing. In most of the countries in the area, however, there is no strong long-term strategy, cycle paths are built here and there (in Bulgaria and Romania), all is about tourism (in Slovenia), even if individual awareness-raising campaigns are having clear success (such as Bike to Work in Slovakia and involving children in Hungary and Slovenia) and some have already started collecting statistical data (Czech Republic) and allocating funds to larger cycling networks (Hungary).

For cycling traffic to be treated in the same way as other forms of traffic, there must be a solid strategic basis and in Sabrina's documents this need appears several times: a long-term vision can succeed in undermining that mentality which in the present hinders development of multimodality, and vice versa, the growing popularity of the bicycle can help stimulate public investments.

It is a virtuous circle, and a mechanism that, despite national differences, applies well almost everywhere. A successful example is the Slovakian national strategy which already in 2015 envisaged actions spread over ten years, including investments in infrastructure, research and development, with the aim of transforming the bicycle into "a regular component of city and regional transport systems”.

No copy-pasting good practices

Both in risk analysis and the drafting of recommendations, concreteness pervades Sabrina's work, starting from the photographic apparatus which shows dangerous and improbable intersections, underpasses with too low ceilings and crowds of pedestrians crossing freely, traffic lights at risk of investment and cycle path ending nowhere.

Photos turned into field research and consultations, in the awareness that good practices are not tried-and-tested recipes valid everywhere and in every period, but rather suggestions to be developed and enriched with the participation of the actors on site.

“We included different types of practices, the good ones, the best ones and the promising ones – reads one of the final documents  presented at the Bucharest conference in autumn 2022 – looking for strategies, methods and activities that had great potential and a good reception in public and political level, which were transferable, albeit with modifications, to other contexts and regions, and which were sufficiently documented to be able to benefit from them".

In summary: “Good practices are not copy-pasted”. The strategies, planning and concrete characteristics of the infrastructure will adapt to each country while pushing against some resistance, attempting for example to undermine the idea that cycling is only for free time. The change in habits of road users will take place step by step, both as a result of effective awareness and education campaigns, and due to the objective change in driving conditions (speed limits, lane restrictions, obligation to give way) or thanks to incentives. Prohibitions and incentives are inspired by concrete examples, such as the Romanian CFE, a certification that rewards those who switch from car to bike to go to work.

In the European Union, Bucharest is the most traffic-congested city, and it accounts for more than a fifth of cycling deaths (418 per year). The CFE certification is the only one in Europe that attests to the level of involvement, promotion and evaluation of the support that companies give to the bicycle as an alternative means of transport for employees. Started in 2014, the initiative involved more than 1700 people in over 300 companies (respectable numbers, considering the precarious safety conditions for bicycles and the fact that the car in Romania is widely seen as a status symbol), and perhaps one of the most surprising effects was the reduction in sick days requested by workers.

Sabrina recommends that designers, local administrators and decision-makers in general consider the bicycle as one of the constituent elements of mobility, in all phases of planning and implementation. But in order for projects to actually improve the situation, convince more people to change transport, and attract ever more substantial funds towards light mobility, five basic principles must be followed, which make the bike option safe, comfortable, direct, attractive and consistent.