Join the ECC2015: play with your citizens and promote cycling!
The initiative, which will be held throughout the month of May 2015, it's not a sport challenge but it sees the various cities, each with its own team, challenging each other in using bicycles as a mode of daily urban transport. Participating cyclists, each tracking their own bike rides with a free GPS-based smartphone app, will contribute to the total number of kms cycled in their cities. The rankings, both locally (among participants), and on a European level (among cities), are constantly updated and are a fun way to measure oneself against ones fellow citizens, colleagues and friends as well as against the participating cities. In the previous editions, this fun way of monitoring in real time gave birth to an even more entertaining way of mutually involving citizens through word of mouth and social networks, as well as a host of media coverage on local radio stations and newspapers. The European Cycling Challenge is an effective way to promote cycling in your city.
Play with your citizens and get useful data.
The European Cycling Challenge offers a new way to promote cycling at urban level. Indeed, further than a means of transportation, the bicycle becomes also a game, and the Local Administrations play together with their citizens to let them use the bicycle as much as possible. No matter the length of the single trip: each participant as part of the city team will add its mileage to help the team to win the Challenge!
Beside the "gamification" approach, technical aspect plays an important role in the ECC: at the end of the Challenge, anonymous data on all cycled routes will be available to the participating cities. Once elaborated, data could come up with interesting statistics to support planning and validation of routes network and cycling paths. Real time collective heat-maps of most cycled routes will be directly available on the ECC website and on the mobile app.
Thanks to all GPS data collected in 2014 edition, many cities elaborated their own heat-maps being able to identify what are a city's most used routes, and then check the strength of existing and planned cycling networks.
Past editions
The initiative, already awarded with the CIVITAS Award in 2013 for Public Participation, has achieved excellent results in its previous editions.
32 European cities joined the 2014 edition (Rome, Warsaw, Tallinn, Oslo, Barcelona, Malaga, Bristol, Bologna, Padua are only some of them) with 17.000 cyclists covering more than 1,5 millions of km, for a total saving of CO2 estimated in about 180 tons.
During the month of May 2014 all participating cities arranged also local events to promote the Challenge, such as bike rides and "bike breakfast", and many of them awarded cyclists during final award ceremonies, enforcing in this way the relation between the city administration and its urban cyclists.
Sign up your City today!
The Municipality of Bologna and the SRM, the Authority for Mobility and Local Public Transport, are confident that the 2015 edition will confirm the positive results achieved in the previous editions, confirming once again the validity of the Challenge and its strategic role in promoting bicycle as a mode of urban transport. For these reasons, we are therefore proud to invite your city to next 2015 edition.
For more information and registrations, interested cities can visit www.ecc2015.eu , or contact SRM via telephone at +39-051-361328 or via email at progettieu@srmbologna.it.