Velo-city Ghent — Day 2: People, ideas, and the art of making cities flow

We keep saying it: conferences are about people first. Wednesday was full of them—planners with muddy shoes, data wonks with good stories, and campaigners who’ve learned to turn friction into fuel. We left every room with something we can put to work back home.

Morning: multimodal life, not mode wars

A session anchored by UITP and city operators made a simple point: public transport + cycling works best as a lifestyle, not a tug-of-war. Brussels framed it as “1 + 1 = 3”—cooperation beats competition when you design for the whole journey, train drivers and cyclists to understand each other, and focus on easy transfers rather than arguing about bikes on board. Their internal “live-my-life” exercises (cyclists try driving a bus; drivers try riding those streets) were a hit because they change the tone of the debate.

Barcelona’s metro area showed what authorities can actually build: a 530 km Bicivia network (66% delivered), secure Bicibox parking (free, e-scooters welcome, 20.5k+ registered users), and AMBici public bikes (~7,000 trips/day, with hand-off to Bicing). Stitch it together in one app and people start living multimodal without thinking about it.

And from African cities, a refreshingly pragmatic lens: treat the bike as a working tool and integrate it as a feeder to the mass-transit projects now rolling out. Put cycling into SUMPs with real targets, support an e-bike/bike ecosystem, and the wheels (literally) start turning.

The huge bike parade, just before it started parading.

Midday: intersections that don’t make you hold your breath

Engineers from Denmark and the Dutch Cycling Embassy walked through signal tricks that feel small but change your day: early green for bikes, green-wave coordination, right-turn on red for cyclists where safe, and active detection to extend green when a platoon arrives. The takeaway: design for flow and safety together; separated lanes alone won’t save you at the junction. Copenhagen’s Dybbølsbro case showed how one missing link can ruin the ride—and how ITS, shorter cycle times, and reserved space for left-turners get it back.

Meeting good friends at great connferences. What better is there? Great to meet Peter Staelens from EuroCities, long time my EU-contact when I was the national coordinator for European Mobility Week.

Afternoon: beyond bikelash—real participation, measured results

The participation block was electric. Schaerbeek (Brussels) shared hard numbers two years after rolling out Good Move locally: –36% car traffic, +38% bikes (with +33% women cyclists, versus +19% region-wide). Later evaluation shows –25% cars on busy axes and +15% faster public-transport lines in parts of the network. That didn’t happen by magic; it came with diagnostics, rounds of participation, fast fixes on signals, and relentless communication—even when the debate got loud.

Ghent compared its 2017 circulation plan (clear concept, top-down at first) with today’s district mobility plans (bottom-up from the start). Same energy on both sides of the debate, different choreography: ask early “what do you want?”, then test scenarios, then circle back with monitoring and adjustments. Will it ever be enough? Maybe the better question is: are we learning in public? 

Norway rounded it off with a tidy twelve-point playbook: start from a shared vision, give citizens more than they lose, prototype in the street, and treat communication as a marathon. We’ll be citing that one.

Plenary: the wide-angle lens

PATH’s global scan reminded us how far there is to go: tracking which countries name walking/cycling in national policies and NDCs, and giving regions a dashboard to benchmark progress. It’s not just a scoreboard; it’s a prompt to align local work with national climate commitments. Also: a quick showcase of Smart Pedal Pitch finalists—nice proof that useful ideas can be small, sharp, and ready to test.

Meetings, networking and impressive shows. Thanks, Velo-City Ghent!

What we’re bringing home (and quietly offering our clients)

• Design the whole trip. Secure B+R, simple hand-offs, one app—multimodality by default, not by lecture.

• Fix the scary bits first. Junctions decide whether people ride tomorrow: early green, green waves, clear priority, human-scale cycles.

• Make participation measurable. Start early, show your baselines, publish before/after—and be ready to tweak quickly. The trust follows the feedback.

• Tie city actions to climate signals. Use national dashboards to frame why local steps matter.

Wonderful people, generous experts, lots of motivated city-makers. Day 2 felt like a masterclass in how to move a city—one junction, one bus-stop, one conversation at a time.