A few days ago, we published the results of our EU-wide survey of MEP candidates’ views on cycling. We had asked them to react to our manifesto, and what we found out then is similar to what we’ll be telling you now: there is overwhelming support for our policy recommendations. We take that as great news here at ECF, although we need to bear in mind a few limitations to the exercise, mostly due to a suspected pro-cycling bias in respondents. But who comes out on top? We've crunched the numbers and produced analysis based on the candidates' countries and the various parties they belong to.

In our previous post, we showed you the general results of the survey, but they didn’t show who said what. So this time round, we segmented the results along country lines so you can now see how the candidates from your country replied. And to make things interesting, we also regrouped all the respondents by major political grouping. To do this, we had to exclude non-aligned political clusters and parliamentary groups with fewer than 30 respondents. When numbers are too small, it’s impossible to take meaningful insights from the data. Ask your statistician neighbour! This left us with the five major contenders for the elections, namely European parties that represent the far left, the socialists, the greens, the liberals, and the centre-right. We were conscious of the fact that these groups aren’t set in stone, especially in election years, but we kept the party lines like they are today (for the EU cognoscenti, we’ve kept EGP+EFA together for example).

High cycling rates

Out of the total number of respondents, we found that 16% never cycle at all, 40% a few times a month, and 34% at least a few times a week. This is a surprising result in itself – if all of these candidates continued to cycle after moving to Brussels (to work as MEPs) they’d have much higher rates of cycling compared to the rest of the Brussels population! This is good news of course, to lead by example. But it can be brought down to the fact that a certain bias was involved in the respondents: those who actually cycle were more likely to have answered the survey. But the question you’re all asking is… who are the lazy ones who don’t cycle as much as they should?

As can be seen from the chart, two countries really stand out here: Denmark and the Netherlands. Hardly surprising, considering the cycling culture that prevails there. But there are also a few other noteworthy countries: Finland, Latvia and Poland all have a majority of respondents who cycle frequently. By comparison, fewer than 20% of respondents from Estonia, Czech Rep and Cyprus get on their bike at least once a week. There are a few other countries with surprising data, but they are characterized by low respondent rates (remember your statistics!). Most notably, the United Kingdom only has one MEP candidate who took part in our survey. Mr Bill Newton, your country thanks you! It could be worse – some Member States didn’t return a single survey…

And what about the Parliamentary groups? The graph here shows that the differences between political colours are minor – each group has its fair share cyclists and non-cyclists. But when you look at the data closely, the European Greens and European Left have above average cycling rates. ALDE (Liberal) gets the prize for least cycling, as only a third of their candidates declared cycling at least a few times a week.

Good global backing of our manifesto

In practice, it doesn’t matter if candidates cycle or not. There are many valid reasons why MEPs don’t use this fabulous mode of transport as part of their routine – say, long distance from work or disability. What really counts is what they think about our recommendations. It turns out that six of our ten recommendations gather overwhelming support (90%+) on topics ranging from the development of our Eurovelo network to better linkage between health and cycling in policy. 96% of respondents agreed that we need better safety norms for cars and lorries – we hope they will defend this position in reaction to the announced blockage of new safety norms for trucks. 

Of the remaining proposals, support varies depending on the party. For instance, the EPP (entre-right) supports at 92% the creation of a European Master Plan by 2019. But there are a few more divisive issues, however. Our fourth point, the development of fiscal measures to put cycling on the same level as other forms of transport, attracted 88% approval across all respondents, but only 66% of ALDE candidates liked the idea. This is in contrast to 100% of candidates from the European Left! Likewise, our recommendation to increase air quality standards so they meet WHO levels also gained unanimous support with the European Left, but only 72% from ALDE and 77% from EPP.

Item 8, which looked at mandatory data collection for cycling use, was the recommendation that attracted most ambivalence considering the general standards of the survey. One quarter of the respondents didn’t agree to this proposal, and the figure rises to 35% of EPP and 40% of ALDE. By comparison, only 24% of S&D (social-democrats), 18% of Left and 15% of Greens disagreed to this. We’re a bit disappointed by the news, because good data is central to making the right investments – Eurostat doesn’t publish cycling data because of data gaps in certain Member States. Our question is: how is one supposed to get a good picture of transport patterns if you measure car, bus, and even airplane use, but not cycling or walking?

Conclusions

Interpretation of the survey has its limits, naturally. The answers given by the candidates are individual, so when they’re aggregated to a parliamentary group, it doesn’t necessarily represent what the group’s position will be when the time for debate has arrived. It’s an indication. It’s an amuse-bouche. And the over-arching indication, based on the answers we received, is that the European Left and European Greens are the groups with the most comprehensive support for our manifesto. The European Left came in first position in 9 out of 10 cases, in terms of the share of support of its candidates for our recommendations. The Greens trail behind, but only by a few percentage points each time. One could make a tentative observation that ALDE and EPP will have most resistance to some ECF positions due to their regulatory nature (fiscal measures, air standards, data collection).

All in all, we can be encouraged by the answers given by the 364 candidates, and we thank them for taking the time to express their views on our manifesto. If the European Parliament were elected with such support for cycling policies and the MEPs were pro-active for their development, it’s safe to say that cycling will be given a fairer place in transport policy over the next few years. Either way, the bike has great days ahead of it – transport for a healthy, sustainable future. We are convinced, what about your MEP?

Blue box:
If you would like to know what your MEP candidate thinks, have a look at the raw results here (click here). If he didn’t answer, what about calling him up and asking him to say what he thinks about our manifesto (click here). The elections are soon – get out and vote!