How many people can reach a hospital, a school or a business park by bike? For years we answered that question with a circle on a map: everything within 7.5 kilometres counts. In late September, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management published a report that replaces this approach with a concept far closer to reality: cyclability. That concept did not appear out of nowhere. It builds on the accessibility scores Argaleo has developed in recent years with SmartwayZ.NL, Tour de Force and the Natuur en Milieu foundation, and that are running in the Digitwin platform today.
From circle to curve
The report, written by Dutch Cycling Intelligence on behalf of the ministry, abandons the fixed distance threshold. Instead it uses travel-time decay curves: the longer the trip, the smaller the share of people who will actually make it. The curves are derived for each trip purpose from ODiN, the Dutch national travel survey. The figures show why this matters: beyond 7.5 kilometres the cycling share drops to just 9 per cent, and half of all commuters are unwilling to spend more than 20 minutes on an e-bike to get to work.
Cyclability therefore combines four elements: can you get there (accessibility), do you want to (willingness), how many people could realistically switch (potential) and what do people actually do (behaviour). That gives a far more realistic picture than a circle drawn around a facility.
The e-bike redraws what is within reach
For the first time, the report draws a national distinction between the bike and the e-bike, and that is where the findings get interesting. One example from the report: from the Voorburg-Midden neighbourhood, the Plaspoelpolder business park is a 17-minute bike ride away. At 17 minutes, roughly half of local residents are willing to make the trip. By e-bike the same trip takes 13 minutes and willingness rises to three quarters of residents.
The same trip, four minutes shorter: the group willing to make it grows from half the neighbourhood to three quarters.
Calculated at neighbourhood level across the Netherlands, this redraws the picture of what is within reach. Outside the cities in particular, the e-bike brings within reach distances that an ordinary bike does not. For facilities in smaller villages and for business parks on the edge of town, that is not a detail; it is the difference between having an alternative to the car and having none.
A head start in Brabant
Cyclability has a history, and Argaleo has been part of it from the start. In 2024, together with SmartwayZ.NL, we produced the first walking, cycling and e-bike accessibility picture for the south of the Netherlands. In 2025 a national version followed, with Tour de Force and the Natuur en Milieu foundation: accessibility scores for daily amenities in every neighbourhood in the Netherlands. For SmartwayZ.NL, the method then grew into accessibility scores for each neighbourhood in the Digitwin platform: from the cyclability of business parks for employer engagement programmes through to multimodal trade-offs, developed together with Breda University of Applied Sciences and Eindhoven University of Technology.
The same building blocks, from travel-time decay curves to the distinction between bike and e-bike, now underpin the national picture the ministry has published. Those scores are not frozen in a report: in the Digitwin platform we recalculate them daily, so a municipality or region sees immediately what effect a new route, housing development or facility has on cyclability. We have shown how this works for business parks in an earlier piece on Mobility Matching.
“Cyclability makes the conversation concrete: you see not only where accessibility falls short, but also for whom, and which measure delivers the most.”
Joost de Kruijf, Dutch Cycling Intelligence
What you can do with it tomorrow
For municipalities, provinces and regions this is more than a national monitoring tool. The scores are available at neighbourhood level and can be linked to target groups: where the employees live who could reach the business park by e-bike, which villages are losing accessibility for older residents, and where a small change in the network delivers disproportionate benefit. The report recommends making cyclability a standing part of decision-making, from infrastructure prioritisation through to where new housing is built.
“A region used to wait weeks for an accessibility study. In the platform, a municipality now sees within a day what a new route or housing development does to cyclability. That is no longer a report, it is a tool you work with.”
Jeroen Steenbakkers, Argaleo
The full report is available at open.overheid.nl.
Want to see how cyclable your area is?
The cyclability and accessibility scores are already running in the Digitwin platform. We would be glad to show you what they mean for your own municipality or region.
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