Amsterdam has lost it’s top spot as the world’s most bicycle-friendly city to Copenhagen, losing out because of a lack of innovation on improving infrastructure. The Danish capital overtook Amsterdam on the 2015 Copenhagenize Index of the world’s Top 20 bike-friendly cities which was published this week. Copenhagen won points for numerous improvements to cycling in the city.
According to Copenhagen city council’s 2014 cycling report, it’s expected that half of the people who work or study in the city will commute on bikes this year, which is up from 45 percent last year, and up from 36 percent a decade ago.
“You simply can’t keep track of the constant flow of new bicycle urbanism stuff in Copenhagen,” Copenhagenize, an urban design consulting firm, wrote, citing two bridges that opened in December and four new bicycle bridges scheduled to open in the future.
According to the city’s website, Amsterdam has said that it needs to invest €120 million euros by 2020 to address the main issues related to parking and the cycling network. A number of other Dutch cities were also in the top 10, with Utrecht coming in third place and Eindhoven at fifth. Three French cities, Strasbourg, Nantes and Bordeaux also made the top 10.
The Copenhagenize index ranks selected urban areas using criteria including advocacy, cycling culture, infrastructure and bike-sharing programs to determine the friendliness of a city.
The top 20 cities are as follows with the 2013 ranking shown in brackets.
1. [2] Copenhagen
2. [1] Amsterdam
3. [3] Utrecht
4. [new] Strasbourg
5. [8] Eindhoven
6. [9] Malmö
7. [6] Nantes
8. [5] Bordeaux
9. [7] Antwerp
10. [4] Seville
11. [17] Barcelona
12. [10] Berlin
13. [new] Ljubljana
14. [new] Buenos Aires
15. [11] Dublin
16. [new] Vienna
17. [19] Paris
18. [new] Minneapolis
19. [20] Hamburg
20. [14] Montréal
