The SABRINA project focuses on road infrastructure safety for cyclists as one of the most vulnerable road users. Project partners tackle cycling infrastructure safety issues on existing, planned, and missing cycling corridors crossing nine countries in the Danube region. This is being done by raising the capacities of relevant national, regional, and local stakeholders, to build and improve bicycle infrastructure in a safe and sustainable way. 

There are a lot of very good but also bad examples out there, showing us how cycling infrastructure should or should not be built. Therefore, in many cases, there is no need to re-invent the wheel. We just need to learn from the experience of other countries and transfer them to our own environments. To collect and collate different examples and practices relevant to cycling infrastructure and safety improvements measures, all SABRINA project partners started to collect the information and materials already at the end of 2020. The work was done under the leadership of the Austrian Road Safety Board (KFV), who is the responsible partner for this activity in the project. 

There has been a lot of discussion about the term ‘Best Practice’ and whether there can be such thing as Best Practice at all. Many people would say that in every practice there is still room for improvement. However, we have decided to include relevant good, best, and promising practices in the report, i.e., a strategy, method, or activity in the field of safer cycling infrastructure that:

• has shown (or has great potential) to solve an issue, to bring about improvement in a sustainable way, with good public and political acceptance, in a cost-efficient way.
• is transferable – usually with modifications – to other settings, regions, countries, jurisdictions. Hence, good practices are more than a blueprint to copy & paste.
• is well enough documented in English so that others can build on this knowledge for their individual settings.

The report will describe state-of-the-art and evidence-based best practice knowledge on the essential ingredients of safe cycling infrastructure. The content will draw together evidence from practitioners in the Danube region and beyond, as well as from scientific literature and previous EU research projects (INTERREG and Horizon programmes). The report will offer: 

• Cycling development and improvement strategies & policies on the national, regional, and local level from, but not limited to, countries within the geographic scope of the SABRINA project. With respect to promotion and awareness-raising, positive benefits of cycling to health and the environment are considered.
• Examples of planning, implementation, and maintenance of safe (cycling) infrastructure, e.g., regional and local bicycle networks and their planning guidelines and issues.
• Methods for safety assessment of cycling infrastructure. 

The data collected in the report will inform SABRINA’s Best practice bicycle safety improvement fact sheets, the recommendation for implementation of best practices as well as the development of the Safe Cycling Routes Toolkit.

Stay tuned for more details about best practices report in the next months. It will be published during summer on our webpage dtp.interreg-danube.eu/SABRINA. For all the latest updates, follow us also on our social media profiles.

Photo credit: Partnership for Urban Mobility, Czech Republic