Cycling Research Board Annual Meeting

This presentation examines the role of cycling in rural areas and explores how its relevance and use can be brought more strongly into focus. A key challenge is that smaller municipalities and rural regions often lack organised cycling communities, which makes collaboration with local populations as well as the co-development and advancement of cycling measures more difficult. In addition, both public discourse and research tend to focus predominantly on urban contexts, whose approaches cannot be directly transferred to rural settings. Yet rural areas also hold significant potential for cycling as a mode of transport, particularly in replacing car use for short-distance trips, where reliance on automobiles is typically higher than in cities.
The presentation therefore centres on the question of how cycling can quickly become more visible and present at the local level, in order to generate initial momentum for broader cycling promotion. Drawing on the “bicycle-friendly municipality” project, we demonstrate how targeted interventions in smaller municipalities can strengthen structures, visibility, and acceptance of cycling, thereby enabling new forms of participation and collaboration. We conclude the talk with an open question regarding what additional approaches exist—or could be developed—to further strengthen cycling as a mode of transport in rural areas. More broadly, the presentation aims to raise awareness of cycling promotion in rural contexts and to bring this topic more prominently into ongoing discourse.