Velosafe Flanders: six out of ten Flemish people consider their neighborhood unsafe for young cyclists | inland

The first rays of the sun peep – finally -, the mercury is ticking 15 degrees and then you know: there is the Fleming on his bicycle. For the daily commute to work, the weekly trip with the kids to football training or for the Sunday tour with friends on the racing bike. The Fleming and his steel steed, that’s a strong match. The love was already great, but during the corona pandemic we definitively switched to e-bikes, cargo and racing bikes. And yet an endless list of obstacles puts sticks in the wheels of all that carefree cycling pleasure. Dangerous intersections, cars, buses and trucks, very fast bicycles and slightly slower bicycles. But also too narrow and poorly constructed cycle paths, murder lanes. Six out of ten Flemish people give bad points when it comes to this and think that their municipality has too few safe cycle paths. This is evident when the new edition of VeloVeilig Vlaanderen is launched, the largest bicycle survey that HLN is once again organizing this year.

Six out of ten Flemish people send their children to the streets with a scared heart while cycling, according to a survey of 7,500 Flemish people by research agency iVOX and HLN. That is a lot. Too many. And we want to do something about that this year too. For ten days, from Wednesday 3 May to Friday 12 May, everyone will be able to report dangerous bicycle points in the HLN app. It will once again be the largest bicycle survey ever, with a detailed cycling map of Flanders as a result. This way you warn other cyclists, let the government know where there is still work to be done and you make cycling safer for everyone. Moreover, the dangerous bicycle intersections will also be visible in Waze this year, so that car drivers also stay alert.

It remains essential. Because the love for our bike unfortunately also takes its toll. Never before have so many cycling fatalities occurred as last year. 95 cyclists lost their lives. One in three casualties in our traffic was a pedestrian or cyclist. “Unfortunately, the fact that the popularity of the bicycle is also reflected in the accident figures is not surprising,” says Tom Brijs, professor of road safety (Imob). “We cycle more and the distances are also increasing. Where we used to take the car or public transport for a journey of twenty kilometers, we now take the electric bicycle.”

And for that we need: decent cycle paths. And according to many Flemings, there are not enough of them. More than half think they are in poor condition, six out of ten think they are unsafe and more than six out of ten think their board does not invest enough in them. “Bicycle paths, separated from the roadway, that is the main working point of Flanders”, says Brijs. “Steps are being taken. For example, the new Fietsvademecum, which bundles the design guidelines for cycling infrastructure in Flanders, now prescribes that cycle paths must be geared even more to the permitted speed of the adjacent road. An adjacent cycle path along a street where you are allowed 70 kilometers per hour? That is no longer of this time. Separation is the safest option, but not always possible due to expropriations. The only way to temporarily solve that is to reduce the speed for cars there. That is always a difficult discussion – that’s always the case with a zone 30 in a residential area – but in the end those things do get established, you know.”

Fortunately, it does work on many points. 56 percent give their municipality 7 or more out of 10 when it comes to bicycle safety. Half of the Flemish people also think that it has become safer for cyclists in the past five years. And VeloVeilig shows that too, because in addition to red points there are also green points this year, good examples, places that we can consider safe. “The road is still long, bicycle safety is a work of years. But the Fleming feels that things are moving. Budgets are historically high. The focus is on bicycle allowances and leases. From now on, safety and not traffic flow is the most important thing, our conflict-free traffic lights are the best example of this. The roads to get there could be better, but our school environments are safe. No longer the car, but the bicycle has become a priority.”