Routes & Travel

Even in Europe summer has arrived. For those who haven't already decided where to spend their holidays, we have made a selection of the best bike tours in Europe – all of them available in the Bike Citizens App. And the best thing about it? With our flatrate (19.99 Euro) you can download all city packages so that you are perfectly prepared for your adventurous city trip.

Industrial city, electropolis, global metropolis. Berlins rapid development began more than 100 years ago. Within the space of 30 years, the population grew from 500,000 to 4 million inhabitants. In 1920, Berlin was the third-largest city on the planet. The boom was triggered by the factories. Many of them still exist today, albeit mostly as ruins. A bike tour around the palaces of the last century - all ruins can be specified in the Bike Citizens App as a target destination.

Tel Aviv's compact layout, flat geography, mild climate and young population all combine to create a city that was destined to become a cycling hub. Cycling in Tel Aviv is fun, and nowadays it not just fun but also easy thanks to Tel-O-Fun, the city’s public bicycle program. The project was scheduled to be launched in 2008, but was delayed until the Israeli helmet law was amended in 2011. Once the mandatory helmet age was curbed to 18, Tel Aviv immediately launched the long-awaited Tel-O-Fun, and ignited a true cycling revolution. Bicycle rental stations popped up all around the city, and in a fortnight, the bicycle became a real alternative to the car in Tel Aviv.

Always with these facts and figures! For mathematicians, they belong to everyday life, but how many of us can actually imagine slightly below 2 tonnes of CO2, or 300,000 travelled kilometres? Sometimes we simply lack reference to such statements. Therefore, Bike Citizens has been engaged in different methods over a long period of time for making numbers and comparisons more tangible. The heatmap method of visualisation has emerged as an essential element.

Rory Mcmullan, UK City Agent at Bike Citizens, was at the Velo-city 2016 in Taipei. Here is what the cycling advocate reported about the bicycle fair.

As you may already know, Copenhagen is said to be heaven on earth for anyone with a passion for cycling. This Danish city is the only one in the world where there are actually more bikes than people, with 650,000 bikes to 520,000 humans!

How fast are we when moving from A to B? We are used to talk about regular speed which is distance divided by time. But what about the time spent waiting for the bus or the time spent at work to earn the money to pay all the costs created by the particular mode of transport? Different from regular speed, Effective Speed or Social Speed takes these aspects into account. Effective Speed can be defined by total distance travelled divided by the total time devoted to the mode of transport. Eric Morfa Morales writes about the outcomes of a study on Effective Speed made in Mossoro City, Brazil.

As an equivalent to the metaphor „Wortschatz“ (vocabulary), „Wegschatz“ defines the range of ways an individual knows at a specific time. „Wegschatz“ takes into consideration that every human ability underlies the nature of training and therefore can be highly influenced (learning and forgetting).

Nantes, a city of 600,000 inhabitants in the Pays de la Loire region in Western France, impressed with its clear political intent to become more bicycle-friendly in 2013. The city invested heavily in its urban cycling infrastructure and succeeded in increasing the modal share for cycling (the percentage of travellers using a particular mode of transport, such as car, local public transportation, bicycle or walking) from two per cent in 2008 to five per cent in 2012.