2022-10-24

Cycling is indispensable in the European Union’s efforts to reduce emissions – this was clear from the European Urban Mobility Framework a year ago. But as policymakers set ambitious targets, transport is emitting more than before, using a third of the EU's energy, and keeping Europe dependent on Russian oil. EU’s structural and cohesion funds come to the rescue – or so it seems from pretty graphs. But when cyclists roll onto cycle paths built with these funds, they find an obstacle course: patchy, poorly maintained, sometimes too narrow paths leading nowhere.

A team of three journalists talked to experts, officials, NGOs, and dozens of cyclists in four countries. They also reviewed tendering documents, a sample of EU-funded projects, and some of the actual cycle paths and lanes.

From tiny Malta, which benefited from three EU instruments to produce a basic transport plan, to Romania – one of the largest beneficiaries of EU spending on cycling and pedestrian infrastructure – the team found vague standards and opportunistic planning, driven not by cyclists’ needs but by administrations’ convenience.

The team found that the issue we investigated was, at least at the time, poorly regulated and there was a lack of legal basis to even recover the misused funds.

Photo by Justinas Stonkus 

IMPACT

The findings informed the European cycling strategy formulation and further supported the idea that there should be common EU standards for bike lanes, as well as the EP resolution on this topic — the story contributed arguments to activism and awareness that informed the cycling declaration and EP resolution, which both emphasised standards and safety.
From the next programming period, EU funding beneficiaries are also required to collect cycling-related data separately — something the journalists in this investigations had to do from scratch because nobody was collecting that data.

When Transport committee MEPs were visiting Florence, Daiva Repečkaitė presented the findings of the investigation to them informally.

The project was presented at Dataharvest 2023, online at one of the Earth investigation webinars for improving environmental coverage by Journalismfund (see below), and at the lightning data talks at GIJC 2023 in Gothenburg.

The Lithuanian official who was interviewed during the investigation never got back to the team about the promised safety audits.
The Maltese government continues building car-favouring infrastructure.

Learn more:

Here Daiva Repečkaitė is talking about this project in one of our webinars:

Team members

Daiva Repečkaitė

Daiva Repečkaitė is a Lithuanian multimedia journalist mostly based in Malta.

Daiva Repečkaitė

Zoltán Sipos

Zoltán Sipos is a Hungarian journalist living in Romania.

Zoltán Sipos

Barbora Janauerová

Barbora Janauerová is freelance journalist based in the Czech republic.

Barbora Janauerová
Media

Átlátszó Erdély Romania

Átlátszó Erdély is an investigative journalism project serving Transylvania's Hungarian community in Romania.

Mentor

Staffan Dahllöf

Staffan Dahllöf is a freelance reporter based in Copenhagen, specialised in FOI.

Staffan Dahllöf - ©Olle Asp

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