Influence of the cycling campaign CITY CYCLING on cycling behaviour in Germany

The CITY CYCLING (STADTRADELN) campaign has been running since 2008 to motivate German citizens to use the bicycle for daily mobility routines. In the course of the MOVEBIS research project, nationwide GPS data of the CITY CYCLING participants were collected in the years 2018-2020 and were processed for planning purposes. This contribution addresses the question to which extent the participants in the CITY CYCLING campaign represent cyclists in the Federal Republic of Germany and whether the motivation during the campaign leads to a significant change in mobility behaviour. For this purpose, more than 73,000 complete questionnaires of campaign participants from a survey in the year 2020 were evaluated. The age and gender distribution of app users and non-users of the campaign are corresponding to those of cyclists from representative household surveys in Germany (MiD 2017). App users and non app users differ only insignificantly from each other and are, on average, rather older than in the cycling participants of nationwide MiD survey. The results reveal that the smartphone has no significant influence on the cycling behaviour of the users. The survey participants are regular cyclists. Around 88% of the respondents use the bicycle most frequently in everyday life, followed by the private car (national average) and public transport (in large cities). The influence of the campaign on the level of utilisation or the number of kilometres travelled by bike can be described as rather low, overall. Whereas 65% of the participants stated that they cycled to work just as often as outside the campaign period, 19% of the respondents used the bicycle less often for commuting and 16% more often. The results indicate that the CITY CYCLING campaign captures and represents the everyday transport behaviour of participants. During the COVID-19 pandemic, participants used their bicycles significantly more often (73%). The perception of safety is consistently high. The campaign was rated very positively and the majority of users (91%) would participate again or rather recommend the campaign to others (78%).:1. Introduction 2. State of Research 3. Data and Methods 4. Results 5. Discussion 6. Conclusio