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Milan confirms ambitious new cycling network linking 80% of the city to bike paths

The Cambio project features 750 kilometres of bike paths and is due to completed by 2035

Milan has approved a £200 million plan to create a new network of bike paths linking the city and its surrounding areas.

The ‘Cambio’ Biciplan project was designed in consultation with the Dutch spatial economic research firm Decisio and is part of the city’s goal to secure a 20% modal shift to cycling.

> Paris to become '100 per cent cycling city' within next four years

The network will link 750 kilometres of bike lanes across 24 different lines, including 16 radial, four circular and four long-distance greenways. Some existing routes will be added to the network, while others will be newly constructed.

Milan Cambio - proposed cycling routes

 

The project aims to ensure that around 80% of homes and services in Milan, such as hospitals, schools and railway and underground links, are located within one kilometre of each bike route. The paths will also feature state-of-the-art infrastructure, including low-impact motion-sensor lighting, digital displays, and a network of fibre optic cables, as well as dedicated bike parking stations.

The first path is scheduled to be ready this summer, while the entire network is due to be completed by 2035.

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According to Beatrice Uguccioni, the mobility councillor for the Metropolitan City of Milan, the Cambio project aims to make Milan, a city currently synonymous with industry, congestion and visible air pollution (like so many other urban areas across Lombardy and northern Italy), a place where its inhabitants can cycle “to reach cinemas, schools, health centres and meeting places on innovative routes and to do so in complete safety”.

Uguccioni says that the scheme’s primary goal is to make the bike the most convenient mode of transport for Milan’s population. “The aim is to bridge the gap we have with respect to the most virtuous European metropolitan areas”, Uguccioni said. “This will lead to less emissions and traffic, but also more road safety, as cyclists and motorists will not have to share the same road. It is a unique project in Italy."

This investment in Milan’s cycling infrastructure takes its cue from the success of ‘Plan Velo’ in Paris, the latest phase of which aims to make the French capital a ‘100 percent cycling city’ within the next four years. Yesterday it was reported that the European Commission has for the first time proposed to prioritise investment in cycling as part of an overhaul of urban mobility.

Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.

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Jem PT | 2 years ago
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I have just finished reading Tim Moore's excellent 'Gironimo', and if his description of cycling in Milan is accurate, these measures can't come a moment too soon. I do think however that there will need to be an 'adjustment in attitude' on the part of the locals for these plans to work! 

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OldRidgeback | 2 years ago
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That's good news for Milan. It's not a hilly city so with proper cycling facilities, it'd be pretty good to cross it by bike.

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hawkinspeter | 2 years ago
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Noice - though that picture has made me think of: Spider-Milan, Spider-Milan, does whatever a spider can

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