The Pan-European Master Plan for Cycling Promotion was adopted on 18 May 2021 at the 5th High-level meeting on Transport, Health and Environment. As part of the Vienna Declaration, it is the first officially adopted supra-national document on cycling policy transcending the EU.

The cycling master plan’s main purpose is to politically acknowledge the growing importance of cycling in transport and give guidance at a national level on how to support cycling across respective countries through central government policies. Covering 54* countries, including all 27 EU Member States, it was developed under the umbrella of the Transport, Health and Environment pan-European Programme (THE PEP), which was coordinated by WHO/Europe and UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe).

“Today is a historic day. 54 countries have come together and confirmed their political will to promote cycling. This comes not a day too early with the climate emergency growing by the day. Our answers need to become bolder as we must radically shift our mobility towards more cycling and other sustainable means of transport”, said Henk Swarttouw, President of the European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF), at the adoption ceremony on 18 May.

“We at the European Cyclists’ Federation are proud to have been contributing to the development of this Master Plan from the beginning. I promise we will stay engaged during the implementation phase, remaining a constructive partner while keeping a watchful eye”, said Swarttouw.

Doubling cycling levels by 2030

The key objective (Part I) of the Cycling Master Plan is very ambitious: “To significantly increase cycling in every country to contribute to the overall target of doubling cycling in the region as a whole” by 2030. To that end, the plan says that all countries by then will have to develop and implement a national cycling policy.

Out of the 54 European and North American countries, sixteen countries already have a national cycling strategy, while a further nine are in the process of developing one for the first time. This means that 29 countries are yet to start developing a national strategy.

Thanks to the new Cycling Master Plan, these countries don’t have to start from scratch. Part IV of the Master Plan includes eleven overall recommendations, each of them further elaborated in sub-recommendations. ECF took a key role in developing some of these, leading work on recommendations 3 (“Create a user-friendly cycle infrastructure”), 4 (“Provide sustainable investment and efficient funding mechanisms”) and 9 (“Promote cycling tourism”).

Recommendations and actions

Among the recommendations that stand out is the development of a Trans-European Cycle Network (TEC), based on official national cycle routes and EuroVelo networks and incorporating urban networks and regional cycle routes (Paragraph 43; 100). The Master Plan recommends to “develop minimum infrastructure quality standards” (45) as well as allocating “Sufficient budgetary resources”. A “set share of the national transport budget should be allocated to cycling over all levels of governance” (46). Only Ireland already applied the ECF recommendation to invest at least 10% of the transport capital investments into cycling.

Another action area with UNECE competence is on road signs. Many innovative road signs in various Member States facilitating cycling have popped up in recent years, such as on bicycle streets, contra-flow cycling in one-way streets and turn right/left/straight at red lights, often in different shape and colour. While these innovations are welcome, it may confuse foreign visitors not familiar with such signs. This means that the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic of 1968, which also laid the basis for the Convention on Road Signs and Signals, is in dire need for another updating. Action point 106 is alluding to such an update.

The plan also calls for regularly updated data on cycle use and the provision of relevant baseline data in order to monitor progress in implementing the master plan (108).

In order to assist countries in the development of national cycling policies, the plan announces the creation of a “Pan European Competence Centre for Active Mobility” (99). This however will only come to fruition when properly resourced by Member States.

Notes:
EU policy documents linked to cycling include the 2015 Luxembourg Declaration as well as the 2018 Graz Declaration.
UNECE region: 54 European countries plus the United States and Canada. The pan-European Master Plan for Cycling promotion only applies to the 54 countries.

* Update: Only 41 member states attended the 5th High-level meeting and signed the Vienna declaration, not 54. Only after publishing this article did it become clear to ECF that 13 member states had not been present at the meeting.

Cover photo source: Timur Lazarenko via Flickr. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence.