In an increasingly congested spatial environment and with major sustainability challenges, it is becoming clear to many professionals: for a large part of passenger transport, the bicycle has the future. In the coming years, there will need to be significant investment in promoting and making cycling safer, and in the connection between cycling and public transport, for example. But on what basis do you make trade-offs and decisions? Argaleo is working with knowledge institutions and the Province of South Holland to make reliable cycling information available to enable the scale jump in cycling in a substantiated way.
Wiesje Hofstede works on cycling policy for the province. “South Holland is a busy province,” Wiesje explains. “In addition to current pressure on accessibility, the number of residents and business activity will continue to grow in the coming years, making policy challenges in mobility and accessibility only increase. The province therefore wants to actively promote the use of bicycles with its regional partners, also in combination with public transport. Bicycles take up little space, produce no harmful emissions, cause little nuisance, and of course, it is also good for your health.”
Joost de Kruijf adds: “To make effective trade-offs and decisions to promote cycling, more applicable knowledge is needed. Think of knowledge in the field of cycling behavior, infrastructure planning and effectiveness, and cycling promotion.” To make all this developed knowledge available in a smart, innovative, but especially useful way for policymakers, Argaleo offers the digital twin. “A kind of smart viewer,” according to Jeroen Steenbakkers of Argaleo, “in which we unlock all sorts of data to use as information based on which you can make effective policy. In the digital twin, we bring together all available data from across the Netherlands. This way, we turn data into useful information and interpretations, and we can make improvements to the system and additional data from new parties available to as many partners and users as possible.”
Cross-provincial
“Data-driven policy innovation remains complex,” Joost explains. “Every policy-making organization has its own wishes and requirements when it comes to desired insights. Behind these practical insights lies a world of specialized knowledge and data specialists. At the same time, the insights must be so accessible that every cycling policy officer can work with them. Because data-driven cycling knowledge is still in its infancy, we want to scale nationally, so that uniformity develops in approach and implementation. There is currently too much fragmentation and too many local ‘cycling dashboards’. In knowledge development, we work with different provinces, so more cross-pollination occurs. This means that knowledge innovations we carry out for one province also become available to others. We can only achieve the scale jump in cycling together. Therefore, we find it important that we share knowledge with each other. Not only between provinces, but also with municipalities.”
“The province wants to get cycling data, combined with all sorts of other data, in order and keep it that way. So we can make better choices about which problems or locations we want to address and whether we actually achieve our stated goals in promoting cycling,” Wiesje adds. “In addition, we want to support municipalities with the available data. Especially the smaller municipalities don’t always have the resources, knowledge, and time to deal with this. We want to facilitate that by making the data and tools we have available to our regional partners, so they can also use the digital twin, for example. This way, we show where the bottlenecks and opportunities lie for the provincial and regional cycling network and spatial planning. The accessibility profiles you can see in Digitwin help with this, for example. They show how accessible various destinations (such as a center, train station, or hospital) are by bike.”
Counting points
One of the most obvious methods for measuring cycling traffic is counting the number of cyclists on a route. Wiesje: “Since 2021, we have installed many permanent bicycle counting points in the region. Partly on municipal roads, partly on roads managed by the province. That data is all housed at the National Road Traffic Data Portal (NDW). We asked Argaleo to also add this data to the digital twin, making it easier to consult and interpret the numbers of cyclists on the network. And by combining it with other available data, the bicycle counts become much more relevant and valuable.”
“To enrich the insights, we continuously look at what new data streams are available, what data visualization and analyses, and scenario calculations are being developed. If there are useful things among them, we want to unlock those for our customers as well,” Jeroen states. “Because different regions place different emphasis in cycling policy, a province like North Brabant gives different assignments than, for example, the provinces of South Holland or Utrecht. This provides a diverse range of analysis and visualization options, from which all involved parties benefit.”
Pioneer
Compared to cars and public transport, the cycling world was never as well developed in data terms. “When you see what has been done and achieved, it is clear that the Province of South Holland, as a pioneer, has certainly contributed to this,” Joost explains. “Not only in terms of insight into cycling on bicycle paths, but also by strategically looking at the development of their cycling network based on data, the role of cycling in spatial development, and the cycling accessibility of public transport.” Wiesje: “These insights help with the consideration framework: what is the mobility effect of policy measures and do the costs and benefits of certain interventions weigh against each other? The data and tools from Argaleo give us a basis to provide good substantiation. We use that to actually do something, based on the data. The fact that we can do that with an increasing number of partners is the next step.”
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