I was in Vitoria
Gasteiz in the Spanish Basque country in the late of May. It was the
second meeting of the European biking project. Vitoria (in spanish
language) or Gasteiz (in Basque language) got a population of 242 147
people in a city of 276 km² which gives a very dense city with 860
inhabitants per km².
With 7 % of the
daily trips by bike in 2011 (1 % in 2002), Vitoria Gasteiz is the spanish
city where bicycle is the most used. And with 55 % of walkers and 8
% of public transport customers, the Alava capital is one of the
cities where cars are the less used (29 % of the daily trips). This
is one of the reasons why Vitoria Gasteiz held the title of European Green Capital in 2012.
The car free area of
the old part of the city started in 1976, and in 1993 reached up to
40 000 square meters and up to more than 20 streets. Some of the
pedestrianized streets registered up to 25 000 vehicles. Nowadays the
pedestrian zone reach up to 500 000 square meters.
The city started
it’s cycling policy in the beginning of the 2000's. It built the
first cycle tracks by taking space from cars, by calming traffic in
residential areas with new traffic plan with one way car streets with
two way for bicycle users as you can see in this before/after pictures
 |
| Photos: Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council |
The improvement of the bike use in the
city was also helped by the new tram lines inaugurated in 2008 which
has completely redesign the streets from side to side in order to
give more space to cyclists and pedestrians.
Vitoria Gasteiz is the
good exemple of a city which is quickly becoming "bike
friendly". The city gave more space to cyclists and calmed
motorised trafic in the city and communicated about it by working
closer with the inhabitants. I was very impressed of the results of
this 10 years policy which got very good results without a big and
expensive public bike sharing system !. It just need to be supported by
politicians a little bit of money and to be timeless.
Congratulations to Vitoria-Gasteiz !