Velo-city Ghent — Day 1: Showing up to listen, learn, and bring ideas home

We took a week off client work to be fully present at Velo-city—four days to learn, swap notes with old friends, meet new ones, and come back with practical ideas we can put to work. Day 1 reminded us why this conference matters: the best cycling cities aren’t built on slogans; they’re built on evidence, empathy, and patient advocacy.

Morning: Inclusion is a design brief, not a slogan

One session dug into gender and cycling with rare precision. A Spanish study confirmed the participation gap (women cycle less often than men) and showed why: different trip chains, care responsibilities, safety perceptions, harassment risks, and infrastructure that often ignores these realities. Recommendations were refreshingly concrete—treat women as priority users in policy, fix daily-life trip chains (not just commuter spines), and train for safety including gender-based harassment on bikes.

We also loved two very human programmes: CycleOn (NL), a nationwide toolkit that helps seniors stay mobile and safe—bike-fit, parkours, clubs, conversation cards—run with local partners across hundreds of municipalities, and measured as much for social connection as for safety. And Ghent’s volunteer-powered bike taxi for people with reduced mobility: inclusive mobility doesn’t come cheap, but the social return is unmistakable.

Midday: Women leading, networks growing

“Change is emotional before it’s technical” could have been the subtitle. Speakers showed how women-led networks (from BYCS’s Bicycle Mayors in LATAM to Women Mobilize Women) are building capacity, mentoring, and codifying gender-responsive practice. Themes that travel well: plan for care trips and perceived safety (lighting, width/quality, frequent PT connections), and raise the share of women in decision-making at every level so those priorities stick.

Afternoon: From research to practice (last-mile that actually works)

Two talks zoomed in on bike+transit. A German research consortium is quantifying bike-transit potential—what people need at stations, willingness to pay, impacts on mode share and emissions—so investments in B+R, sharing, and carriage rules can be targeted and defensible. A striking Dutch datapoint: roughly 70% of the 2000–2020 growth in daily train ridership came from increases in cycling to stations. That’s a lever worth pulling.

Taiwan’s perspective added scale and method: island-wide PBS growth, county-level models that size stations by land use, tourism, and network indicators, and a simple message—systematic, quantitative planning beats guesswork.

Closing: Activism is a system too

The day ended with advocacy stories from three very different places. In Macaé (Brazil), an NGO stitched together festivals, training, entrepreneurship and a cycling plan to shift both culture and hardware (think: 900 new racks and business support), proving that community energy can move policy. In Paris, the city formalised the role of local associations with standing committees for infrastructure and policy, grants, spaces, and logistics—because some work (“bike schools”, repair, events) only civil society can deliver at scale. And in Cambridge, a membership charity models the full stack: evidence-based campaigns, positive vision, and a “critical friend” stance that helps projects land.

What we’re bringing back for our clients

• Design for inclusion from the start. Map care trips, perceived-safety hotspots, and harassment risks; set targets and fix the trip chain people actually live.

• Build the bike+transit spine. Prioritise B+R basics, pick corridors where bike feeds rail, and publish one public dashboard that tracks access and travel time improvements.

• Institutionalise the conversation. Create a light but regular forum where user groups review designs before they’re poured in concrete—then fund the grassroots to deliver training and events citywide.

• Measure what matters. Use simple, shared indicators (access times, station catchments, near-miss perception) so everyone can see progress, not just plans.

Day 1 set the tone for the week: people first, numbers close behind, and a bias for things you can pilot next month. Tomorrow, we’ll dive into day 2.