At Urban Mobility Days 2025 in Vilnius Paul Walsh, CEO of Cycling Industries Europe, and Ronald Jorna, project manager of the MegaBITS project, shared their view on how innovation can make Europe’s bicycle industry stronger, more resilient and competitive. Other panellist were Friederike Pischnick, Political Affairs and Government Relations, Bosch GmbH and Koen Tengrootenhuysen, Director Public Affairs Europe, Decathlon.
This session tried to understand how innovation can help the bicycle industry overcome these challenges and become more resilient and competitive. What does it mean to invest in innovation in the bicycle industry? Can the cycling industry change gears and raise demand for the bicycle as a transport mode in its own right? Currently, the cycling industry produces 17 million bikes annually, involving 1.3 million jobs today and project to grow to 2 million jobs by 2030. So, cycling is already a mass market in Europe.
Giacomo Lozzi, who moderated the session, summarized the main take-aways in five points (see box).
Ronald Jorna focussed specifically on the role of Smart Cycling solutions. He explained how cities and region can act as launching customers for smart cycling applications or provide a subsidy to local start up companies in the smart cycling domain. Some years ago the City of Zwolle did this with a start-up shared bicycle company. This was very successful, and now this company operates shared bicycle schemes and delivery bikes across the country, implemented particle sensors on their shared bikes and is working on the installation of ISA (Intelligent Speed Adaptation) to their electric delivery bikes.
Ronald also sees a role for DG MOVE in boosting innovation in the smart cycling industry. In the past years the successful CEF ITS programme has financially supported a range of ITS projects in the field of (C-)ITS and CCAM, but none of the funding went to smart cycling projects, simply because this topic was not mentioned in the calls. The MegaBITS project and Meridian project have jointly written the Road Map for Smart Cycling, with the aim to create more attention for smart cycling. Both projects hope that this will lead to a change in how the EC – DG MOVE looks at ITS for cycling and will include it as a topic in their future CEF ITS calls.