How can we promote cycling in rural areas?

Act­ive travel offers numer­ous bene­fits. Repla­cing car jour­neys with walk­ing or cyc­ling helps to reduce green­house gas emis­sions, improve air qual­ity and boost health through phys­ic­al activ­ity. In France, act­ive travel is not par­tic­u­larly pop­u­lar in rur­al areas. Whilst only 15% of jour­neys of less than 2 km are made by car in major urb­an centres, this fig­ure rises to nearly 30% in less densely pop­u­lated areas¹. There is there­fore a sig­ni­fic­ant chal­lenge in pro­mot­ing cyc­ling in these areas.

Julie Chré­tien. The latest nation­al sur­vey from 2019² shows that 2.2% of jour­neys made by people aged 6 or over liv­ing in rur­al areas are by bicycle, com­pared with 3.2% in major urb­an areas. Pat­terns of cyc­ling dif­fer, with usage of cycle facil­it­ies in rur­al areas peak­ing on Sundays. Con­versely, usage is high­er on week­days in densely pop­u­lated urb­an areas. This illus­trates that, in rur­al areas, cyc­ling is used more for leis­ure than for commuting³.

No, in the 1960s and 1970s, cyc­ling was a pop­u­lar means of trans­port. How­ever, its usage rate fell as car own­er­ship among house­holds rose. Whilst cyc­ling has seen a resur­gence in urb­an centres, the same trend is not evid­ent in rur­al areas. A study car­ried out in Nantes and Toulouse⁴ shows that the mod­al share of cyc­ling rose from 2.6% to 3.9% between 1994 and 2008 in city centres. Con­versely, a decline from 5% to 1.9% was observed in peri-urb­an areas between 1982 and 2008. More recently, Cerema’s mobil­ity sur­veys, which cov­er only a few major urb­an areas and not the whole of the coun­try, appear to indic­ate a sta­bil­isa­tion. The mod­al share of cyc­ling for jour­neys of less than 10 km has remained stat­ic at 2% in rur­al and peri-urb­an areas. Con­versely, it has ris­en from 2% to 5% in major urb­an centres between the peri­ods 2007–2013 and 2021–2023.

Sev­er­al bar­ri­ers have been doc­u­mented. Firstly, the organ­isa­tion­al bar­ri­er. The imple­ment­a­tion of policies to sup­port sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, such as cyc­ling plans, requires spe­cif­ic engin­eer­ing expert­ise. How­ever, the vast major­ity of French loc­al author­it­ies are rur­al and do not pos­sess this expertise.

[Edit​or​’s note: Between 2014 and 2018, the pub­lic engin­eer­ing sec­tor under­went restruc­tur­ing. A report by the Gen­er­al Inspect­or­ate for the Envir­on­ment and Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment pub­lished in 2023 high­lights the con­sequences: “[this reor­gan­isa­tion] will there­fore have left many regions in dif­fi­culty, par­tic­u­larly rur­al areas, which lack suf­fi­cient resources to meet their needs or even simply to respond to and bene­fit from the increas­ingly com­plex and numer­ous calls for pro­jects and expres­sions of interest (AMI), which now form the basis of the State’s sup­port policy for the regions. This gen­er­al trend has fur­ther exacer­bated region­al inequal­it­ies: without pro­ject plan­ning, there are no pro­jects; and without pro­jects, there is no devel­op­ment.”]

The second bar­ri­er is cyc­ling infra­struc­ture. Accord­ing to the Obser­vatoire du vélo dans les ter­ritoires, only 3.6% of roads in rur­al towns are suit­able for cyc­ling, and 1.7% of those in rur­al muni­cip­al­it­ies with scattered set­tle­ments. In towns, this fig­ure ranges from 6% to 16%. Con­trary to what one might expect, it is no easi­er to cre­ate new cyc­ling infra­struc­ture in rur­al areas than in urb­an areas. Indeed, whilst in towns a large pro­por­tion of the land is owned by the loc­al author­ity, this is not the case in rur­al areas. There is a lack of space there to cre­ate new infrastructure.

Yes, and this is the final bar­ri­er to the uptake of cyc­ling in rur­al areas. Of the 227 cyc­lists killed in 2021, 130 were killed out­side built-up areas – a high fig­ure giv­en the low level of cyc­ling in rur­al areas⁵. This high­er acci­dent rate in rur­al areas can be explained by the lack of infra­struc­ture, but also by the sig­ni­fic­ant speed dif­fer­ence between motor vehicles and bicycles. This risk does not encour­age res­id­ents to cycle.

Anoth­er prac­tic­al bar­ri­er explains the lower uptake of cyc­ling: in rur­al areas, the draw­backs of car use are less obvi­ous than in urb­an areas. Park­ing is easy, traffic flows smoothly, and so on. Without any obvi­ous prac­tic­al bene­fits, it is there­fore dif­fi­cult to encour­age res­id­ents to swap their cars for bicycles.

The key factor is hav­ing a driv­ing force in the loc­al area who cham­pi­ons a cyc­ling infra­struc­ture pro­ject. As for spa­tial plan­ning, numer­ous recent stud­ies have shown that the pri­or­ity must be to use the exist­ing road net­work to make more room for cyc­ling. Rather than build­ing new, costly roads, which would con­trib­ute to soil seal­ing, it is pos­sible to sug­gest safer and more pleas­ant routes for cyc­lists by mak­ing minor adjust­ments to exist­ing roads; to lim­it or reduce car speeds on cer­tain sec­tions of road; to provide cycle park­ing at rail­way sta­tions, and so on. There are plenty of solutions!

Finally, cer­tain ser­vices can help bring about changes in beha­viour. I am par­tic­u­larly think­ing of bike-shar­ing schemes, which recent tri­als have shown to be effect­ive in rur­al areas, and long-term bike hire. The aim of pub­lic policy is not to achieve a 100% mod­al shift to cyc­ling, but rather to reduce the num­ber of cars per house­hold to lim­it their use.

Interview by Anaïs Marechal