In April 2025 NAPCORE published the report ‘Recommendations for cycling data standardisation’. The report was produced under the lead of cycling ambassadors Christina Buraga (Cerema, France) and Mirelle Peters (NDW, the Netherlands), with the support of a series of task force members, among which MegaBITS partner Sam Pierce (CIE) and MegaBITS advisory board members Jørgen Wanscher (Hermes Traffic Intelligence) and Tu-Tho Thai (TT&J).
This report, written for EC DG MOVE, provides recommendations on cycling data standardisation, based on the workshops organised in 2024, driven by cycling data ambassadors and the taskforce associated. Based on work carried out interactively with the cycling community the conclusions allowed to select priority use cases and the recommended actions for the identified categories:
- Infrastructure data
- Parking data
- Counting data
- Real-time information for cyclists
The following recommendations are made with respect to the European legal framework and middle-to-long terms actions to be taken:
- Develop new or amend existing standards for representing:
- Cycling infrastructure data, including as the very minimum the type of infrastructure, its surface and width; the final report of the UNECE Group of Experts on cycling infrastructure can be used as a basis for the typology of cycling infrastructure.
- Cycle counting data, including information on the location of counters (geodata), type of infrastructure, modes counted (vehicles and users), direction, temporary/permanent counters, start/end of counting, number of passages counted.
- Cycling parking options and their services, to be included in trip planning and multimodal journeys for all cyclists.
- Real-time information for cyclists that complement the data pillars mentioned above.
- Cyclist behaviour data, including immediate turn choices, short and long route choices, O/D information, travel speed, waiting times, etc.
- Encourage countries that have not yet made a significant progress in establishing relevant national standards to adopt the common standards as listed in point 1.
- Where relevant national standards exist already, support development of tools to convert between them and the common standards.
- Make providing geolocated data (instead of statistical summaries) in the common standard about the infrastructure built and its usage obligatory for EU cofinanced projects.
- Develop or adapt an existing conversion method between the common standards and OpenStreetMap representation of the cycling infrastructure. This can be used in several ways:
- Stop gap provision of infrastructure data where official data is not available or not yet converted to the common standard.
- Additional quality check for official data in the areas where it is already available.
- Better representation of cycling infrastructure in OpenStreetMap in the areas where official data is already available.
- Whenever there is work on static data for cycling, to always add the real-time component to it. It could be done taking inspiration from the MMTIS DR, RTTI DR, SRTI DR, etc. or simply with how traffic management has fully incorporated real-time data.
These recommendations for cycling data standardisation formed the basis for a EU call for proposals in March 2025, concerning particularly topics 11 (cycling counting) and 15 (cycling infrastructure).