The jury is never full of praise, but the numbers speak for themselves: this year Eindhoven has risen to fifth place in the list of most bike-friendly cities. Worldwide! “Eindhoven rolls upwards in this version of the Index but really only because of a lack of innovation by the cities around it in the ranking, rather than its own efforts.”
Anyway, fifth in the world, that’s not something to be sniffed at. And what a strange coincidence: on the same day that the city announces the removal of 480 out-of-order electronic bike docking stations, it seems our bike policy is better than that of, say, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin and Montreal. And the fact that Copenhagen (1), Amsterdam (2), Utrecht (3) and Strasbourg (4) are still ahead of us this year, well, that’s just an incentive for the coming years.
The index is compiled once every two years by Copenhagenize Design Co and Wired. This year 122 metropolitan areas with 600,000 residents and over (in the case of Brainport, 700,000 residents) were judged. The jury emphasises that the list should be carefully compiled, partly due to its time-consuming nature. The score is the result of judging across 13 categories.
The jury still seems to be quite impressed with the Hovenring, but also notes that there is little else here to offer to cyclists. It’s only because our competition were equally uninspired that we didn’t end up lower down the list.
According to the sobering jury: “If the city could pull the Floating Roundabout (de Hovenring, BB) out of its sleeve, there should be no limit to what else they can achieve. Generally, it’s hard to get excited about a city that advanced up the Index without achieving anything.“