The City of Bologna challenges the European Cities to the European Cycling Challenge 2014
The City of Bologna and the SRM – the Agency for mobility and local public transport - invite European Cities and their urban cyclists to the third edition of the friendly competition “European Cycling Challenge 2014 – ECC2014”. The initiative will be held throughout the month of May 2014: in each city, urban cyclists will join their City Team, tracking their movements with a free, smart phone app and contributing to the gran total of kilometers travelled in their city. The City which will have cycled more km will win the Challenge.
The initiative has achieved excellent results in its previous editions, and it was awarded with the CIVITAS Award 2013 for Public Participation. In May 2013, in fact, more than 3,000 cyclists in 12 European cities took part (Bologna, Padua, Rimini, Tallinn, West London, London-Lewisham, Dublin, Lille, Utrecht, Tartu, Kaunas and Vilanova de Famaliçao), cycling more than 300,000 km, with many people often giving up their car so they could use their bikes.
The benefit for the cities involved in terms of image has been twofold: on the one hand, the initiative has had the spin off effect of promoting the city internationally, while on the other, the administrations have involved their citizens on a local level in reaching shared goals, such as CO2 and traffic reduction.
The league tables, both on a local (between participants) and European level (between cities), are updated in real time and are a fun way for citizens, colleagues and friends to compete both against each other and against rival cities. In previous editions, this successful way of keeping up to date in real time gave rise to an even more entertaining way of involving the citizens through word of mouth and social networks, along with some media coverage on local radio stations and in the newspapers. As well as watching themselves climb up the league tables, participants were able to exchange messages and share events and emotions thanks to social networks during the challenge, making it easier to create groups of urban cyclists with whom administrations can dialog on the issues of cycling.
At the end of the Challenge, the cities involved will be able to anonymously request the information of all the routes travelled, and will be therefore able to elaborate this data to come up with some interesting statistics which can be useful for the verification and planning of their own cycling networks. For example, it is possible to create a heat map which identifies a city’s the most used routes and so it is possible to check the validity of current networks and plan future ones.
The City of Bologna and the SRM are confident that the 2014 edition will obtain even better results in terms of participation and visibility, confirming once again the validity of the initiative and offering the participating cities an occasion to dialog with their own citizens on the issue of sustainability and the use of bicycles as a mode of urban transport. For these reasons, we are therefore proud to invite your City to take part in 2014.
Hoping to have your City among the participating teams to the 2014 edition, interested Cities may consult www.ecc2014.eu, which is routinely updated, or contact the SRM at +39.051.361328 or ecc [at] srmbologna [dot] it for any further information or clarifications.
