How can transport planners in cities and municipalities meet the growing demand for optimised cycling infrastructure? How can demand-oriented and efficient planning and evaluation of construction projects take place? Solutions to these and other questions on cycling planning in municipalities are offered by the portal "Cycling in Germany" - RiDE for short, in which comprehensive digital cycling data for municipalities has been available since 1 December 2022.

The portal was developed by scientists from the "Friedrich List" Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences at the TU Dresden (TUD) together with the TUD spin-off flow.d GmbH and Klima-Bündnis e. V. in the predecessor project MOVEBIS (2017-2020). In the current project MoveOn (2022-2024), a further development towards a nationwide usable planning tool is taking place. The web application developed is based on cycling data recorded by smartphone app as part of the STADTRADELN campaign (Intercity Cycling Competition) between 1 May and 30 September 2022. The data processing ensures that, among other things, other modes of transport or activities are detected and removed from the data set if necessary. This produces a high quality result data set.

Rollout of the data platform "Cycling in Germany" (RiDE) for all STADTRADELN municipalities

On 1 December, an important milestone was reached in the MoveOn project: the collected and processed cycling data will be made available to the participating municipalities mostly free of charge via the RiDE portal. The amount of data behind this is impressive: In the course of the STADTRADELN campaign, 5.2 million journeys were collected from around 340,000 cyclists from all over Germany between May and September this year. In total, more than 150 TB of data were collected.

"The impressive figures once again show the importance of the STADTRADELN campaign. They are an indication of how many actors, from the local to the state to the federal level, are successfully pulling together to make the transport revolution more and more successful," says André Muno, project manager of the STADTRADELN campaign.

Overlay of cycling trips across the whole of Germany, shown in a heat map. Particularly high volumes of cycling traffic shine especially brightly. Credits: P.Grubitzsch, S. Lißner, S. Huber, T. Springer, "Visualisierungen aus dem Portal Radverkehr in Deutschland", 2022

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Representation of the source traffic of the Stadtradeln campaign and its goals, based on a hexagonal grid cell in the city of Dresden. Credits: P.Grubitzsch, S. Lißner, S. Huber, T. Springer, "Visualisierungen aus dem Portal Radverkehr in Deutschland", 2022

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Speeds of cyclists visualised on a network graph. Credits: P.Grubitzsch, S. Lißner, S. Huber, T. Springer, "Visualisierungen aus dem Portal Radverkehr in Deutschland", 2022

© Vision Velo UG, flow.d GmbH, Klima-Bündnis e.V.

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The successful data collection also pleases the funding body: The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) sees the MoveOn project as an important contribution to the promotion of cycling in Germany. Dr Volker Wissing, Federal Minister for Digital and Transport, says: "Data opens the door to a multitude of new possibilities that improve people's lives. This includes, for example, needs-based cycling planning. If planners know exactly how many cyclists are travelling on which routes and where specific danger spots lurk, they can make transport networks better and safer. This information has been collected by the MoveOn project funded by the BMDV. From now on, municipalities can simply access the data digitally and integrate it into their transport planning. We want to create even more offers and incentives for data collection and data sharing, both for the private sector and the public sector. For this, we need data spaces like RiDE, our Mobilithek and the Mobility Data Space - and this in all areas. We have also agreed on this in the digital strategy. For me, it's very clear: digital is better."

Further development of existing and conception of new use cases

After the data collection and processing has been completed this year, the project team will devote itself to intensive work on the development of new and the improvement of existing use cases in the second and third project phase (2023/2024). For example, the representations and the methodology of the source-destination matrices and the waiting times of cyclists are to be revised and new use cases for the evaluation of implemented cycling measures are to be developed.

Project coordinator Dr. Sven Lißner from the "Friedrich List" Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences reports: "Our next challenge is to compare different data years in the cycling portal. We want to develop algorithms that can map different numbers of participants in the campaign or organisational changes that have an influence on the comparability of the data, as well as the addition or removal of neighbouring municipalities."

In parallel, the project team will be offering training courses for municipal cycling planners in the coming months. The participants will learn how the portal works, how to interpret the results of the analysis and how the sample of cyclists is composed. Before the start of the next STADTRADELN campaign on 1 May 2023, the project team will focus on close cooperation with the municipalities.