EUROPEAN CYCLING CHALLENGE

The European Cycling Challenge is the biggest urban cyclists' team competition, which takes place every year May, 1-31.

Born from an idea of the city of Bologna as a small pilot with around 70 people, the ECC is now one of the biggest European cycling events: during the 2016 edition, 52 cities from 17 Countries joined the Challenge, and 46.000 people cycled 4.000.000 km in a month.

The gamification approach turns trips into fun activities, encouraging people to use bicycle as much as possible: participants tracks their bike-trips with a free tracking App contributing to their Team mileage, and through online leaderboards they can check their City Team position in real-time.

Furthemore, the ECC makes cyclists valuable producers of data themselves. All collected GPS data have a priceless value for city planners. Ready-to-use bike-trips heatmaps, which give a first glance of the cyclists’ behaviour, deeper analysis on origins/destinations, loose of time at intersection, possible congestion on cycle lanes, etc., the knowledge of where and when cyclists ride in the city gives city planners detailed feedback about cyclists' real needs.

Çankaya Municipality carries out projects to increase the usage of bicycle in daily life. Consequently Çankaya participated in European Cycling Challenge for the first time in 2015 and also participated in 2016. In 2015 citizens of Çankaya pedaled with 39 European cities for a month, preventing 7 tons of carbon to be released into the atmosphere. Çankaya will participate in European Cycling Challenge every year.

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