Research database

Cycling Waterways is aimed to foster the co-functionalization of waterways for sustainable mobility purposes, with a destination for public use, promoting the set-up of cycling roads on embankment roads of rivers, artificial wetlands, streams, lakes, and canals, including reclamation works and aqueducts by increasing the capacities of all the bodies implied in managing these waterways to develop better-integrated policy instruments. Typically, waterways are feasible bicycle routes. They offer safe paths and satisfy all the essential quality design principles prescribed by the EU: Safety, Directness, Coherence, Attractiveness, and Comfort. Therefore, within inhabited areas, cycle paths along waterways can develop projects related to short-distance mobility (urban/rural; urban/peri-urban industrial areas) and long-distance cycle routes, fostering slow and sustainable tourism and opening up opportunities for enhancing the historical water heritage of the territories. But this potential vantage needs a careful evaluation of the problems that may arise by recovering those waterways for cycling, related to various issues such as the crossing of properties, the financing of cycle paths and their future maintenance, their compatibility with agricultural activities, and the course water management itself as well as the issue of the liability in the event of an accident and injury for the infrastructure manager. Eight European regions with a strong territorial link with the waterways that characterize their territory, be they fluvial, maritime, lacustrine, and different approaches and levels of development to the issue of their cyclability, have met with a common objective to address the problems that their cyclability entails.