Explore cycling histories across time, space, and cities

Cycling Cities: The Digital Experience is an interactive digital platform that brings more than a century of cycling history into a spatial, visual, and comparative format.

Built from the international Cycling Cities research program, the platform translates historical research into an accessible map-based environment. It allows users to explore how cycling practices changed over time, how they differed between cities, and how they were shaped by urban form, mobility alternatives, traffic policy, social movements, and cultural meanings–the five factors that help explain the ups and downs of cycling.

The prototype brings together three kinds of historical evidence:

• photographs and visual materials
• historical narratives
• modal split and statistical data

By combining these sources in one spatial interface, the platform helps users see connections that are difficult to capture in books or articles alone. It shows where cycling practices occurred, how they changed over time, and how official mobility records sometimes overlooked everyday cycling and walking.

The current prototype uses Minneapolis as a primary test case and Rotterdam as a comparative case. It enables users to explore cycling histories through maps, timelines, photographs, narratives, and data visualizations.

The project is designed for researchers, students, planners, policymakers, and anyone interested in how cycling cities develop. It supports both comparison across cities and long-term analysis of mobility change.

Cycling Cities: The Digital Experience is under development under design instructions by Ruth Oldenziel, managed by Michael Keith, and built with computer science student teams at Eindhoven University of Technology, and tested through Peter Bird’s research on Minneapolis.

The platform remains under development. Future versions will expand the number of cities, deepen the comparative functions, and support wider use by practitioners, educators, and public audiences.