Effect of pop-up bike lanes on cycling in European cities

Sebastian Kraus and Nicolas Koch

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: The bicycle is a low-cost means of transport linked to low risk of COVID-19 transmission. Governments have incentivized cycling by redistributing street space as part of their post-lockdown strategies. Here, we evaluate the impact of provisional bicycle infrastructure on cycling traffic in European cities. We scrape daily bicycle counts spanning over a decade from 736 bicycle counters in 106 European cities. We combine this with data on announced and completed pop-up bike lane road work projects. On average 11.5 kilometers of provisional pop-up bike lanes have been built per city. Each kilometer has increased cycling in a city by 0.6%. We calculate that the new infrastructure will generate $2.3 billion in health benefits per year, if cycling habits are sticky.

Date: 2020-08, Revised 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
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