One of the world’s premier cycling cities, Utrecht, hosted the 2026 EuroVelo conference last week, ECF’s annual leisure and bicycle tourism gathering. I was there to present key findings from the 2026 IMBA Europe rider survey and to hear from others working to promote sustainable bicycle tourism and leisure and recreational cycling. All cyclists know our activity can have a profound impact on society, and collecting data is vital to communicating that. But the key message I bring home from this conference is that we cycling advocates need to find new ways to demonstrate the value that cycling contributes to society, outside of simple economic indicators, to convince others that cycling is worth investing in.
In a world obsessed with metrics and measurements, economic impact is key to showing that infrastructure and other cycling initiatives offer a good return on investment. As a cycling community, we need to get better at identifying and communicating the intangible benefits our activity provides society, and convince decision-makers in government, tourism, and industry to reevaluate how they prioritize investments in and promotion of cycling.
On my panel, each panelist acknowledged limits to the depth, relevance, and evidence of their studies. The common denominator behind all our presentations was a general feeling that something more is lurking behind our numbers, something that our models can’t begin to represent.
Joanna Ślusarska from the Krakow region shared results from a study in her region of Poland, which showed that use of new bicycle infrastructure vastly exceeded expectations. Still, resulting commercial overnight stays didn’t approach what was envisioned. Paolo Pinzuti’s Cycle Tourism Index attempts to rank the attractiveness of different bicycle tourism destinations, but struggles to escape the biases inherent in its modeling method. Christian Tänzler from ADFC noted changing demographics, the uncertainty climate change brings, and the action it demands. The IMBA Europe rider survey also shows a clear disconnect between the values of the mountain bike community and the development and marketing of mountain bikes as manufacturers pursue a spec-sheet arms race. The red thread through all these presentations is the inadequacy of existing economic models to represent cyclists’ needs and the benefits they bring to society, and this theme repeated throughout the conference.
In another session, Jasmina Fiasse from Pro Velo in Belgium shared results from a survey of cycling tourists showing that many respondents used reciprocal hospitality services like warm showers, not heavily promoted bicycle-friendly labels. At the same time, while chatting with the team behind Ride With GPS, I learned more about the fantastic community of users sharing routes and travel tips. For my technical field trip, I revisited the mountain bike trails in Heuvelrug, where a team of volunteers maintains a fun, flowy, and progressive network of trails. In each case, so much experiential value is being created outside of commercial endeavors, and escaping the economic metrics we use to attribute value.
Taken together, my key takeaways from this conference are that while access to reliable data is critical, and something that we must improve in the cycling advocacy community, equally important is the need to find new ways to demonstrate the value of the work we do, and the contributions cycling for leisure, recreation, and tourism bring to our communities and society at large.