On 30th of March 2022 we raised a glass on our 5th birthday, with two years delay due to the corona crisis. Local administrations, technical and innovative experts and users followed some workshops and debated with us on how to go from here.

  • Tina Caers launched the party. She guided the participants through a brief history of cycling policy and how data can contribute to improve this. She presented some insights in the innovative and interactive future for the Cycle Barometer and how we wish to make an even bigger impact on local, interprovincial and European level, with amongst other our EU partners of the BITS project.
  • The practical workshop “counting cyclists” provided experience and insights on how to place a counter and what to do with the resulting data.
  • The “online Cycle Barometer” workshop focused on some hands-on examples on how to identify low quality cycle paths, or obstacles, but also on how to extract and reuse this information in other platforms, or software.
  • A third workshop displayed a view on the future. Keeping the infrastructural data of the Cycle Barometer up to date is important. With a new online tool local authorities can mark and indicate where the infrastructure has been redesigned, where plans for redesign exist or where speed limits have changed.
  • This also allowed a first preview on the “Trends meetfiets” – dashboard. This is a new pilot project of the EU BITS project in which these qualitative changes in cycling infrastructure between earlier and new measurements can be visualised in graphs and maps.
  • A last workshop gave some tips on how to use Cycle Barometer. It demonstrated how a cycling policy can use Cycle Barometer to formulate priorities, to define short – and long term solving of obstacles. It also showed how numbers can tell stories, how to communicate with the Cycle Barometer.

To close, a network lunch was held during which the deputy of the Province, Luk Lemmens, cut the 5 year anniversary cake.

You can check the presentations and video-recordings of the sessions of the event on our website.