Abstract
Cycle highways, also known as “fast cycle routes”, are an emerging concept in urban planning that describes long distance, high quality bicycle routes built for commuter use. In Northern European countries, large sums of money are invested into cycle highways promising to induce a mode shift with little critical assessment as to how cyclists experience these infrastructures. Through eleven interviews of practitioners from five European countries – the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and Denmark – this paper explores how practitioners define cycle highways and how their conceptualizations of cycling experience shape the physical design of cycle highways. Results show that while practitioners are guided by infrastructural standards for cycle highways such as width, design speed, and intersection treatments, it is less clear how these infrastructure elements fit within the surrounding environment to create desirable cycling experiences. In addition to commuters, cycle highways are also used by recreational and sport cyclists, so policy makers and designers should consider a wide variety of user groups and their aesthetic and social experiences in the planning and design of cycle highways. Future research should investigate cycle highway experiences from the perspective of various user types.
Highlights
Cities around the world are building cycle highways to encourage sustainable inter-urban transport using bicycles, e-bikes, and other forms of small wheeled vehicles (Pucher and Buehler, 2017)
Cycle highways are often framed within a package of interventions, along with improvements to public transport, with the intent of changing commuting behavior by substituting investments in road infrastructure to cope with expected commuter traffic growth (Skov-Petersen et al, 2017)
Practitioners gave two types of cycle highway definitions, with one relating to goals and another relating to execution
Summary
Cities around the world are building cycle highways to encourage sustainable inter-urban transport using bicycles, e-bikes, and other forms of small wheeled vehicles (Pucher and Buehler, 2017). Dutch practitioners Sargentini and Valenta (2015) warn that bicycle paths should not be built with the same logic as automobile highways and instead should take cyclists' embodied experiences and a variety of individual motives into account. Cycle highways incorporate many of the elements known to improve the attractiveness of cycling, such as priority crossings, rest areas, lighting and effective wayfinding (Thiemann-Linden and Van Boeckhout, 2012) While these measures have been shown to improve the attractiveness of cycling routes (Heinen et al, 2010), there is a relatively little academic research on how these elements impact the experience of cycling and none to date that explore practitioners' conceptualization of cycling experience. How do practitioners articulate cyclist types and cyclists' motives within the conceptualization of cycle highways?
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