Bremen - GERMANY

The City of Bremen is a Hanseatic city in northwestern Germany. A port city along the river Weser, about 60 km south from its mouth on the North Sea, Bremen (approx. 550.000 inhabitants) is part of the Bremen-Oldenburg metropolitan area (2.37 million people). Bremen and Bremerhaven are the two cities in the state of Bremen (official name: Freie Hansestadt Bremen – Free Hanseatic City of Bremen).

Bremen has a long tradition to develop cycle-traffic. Even in the times of heavy increase in motorization bike lanes were built as well, whereas in other big cities in Germany existing bike-lanes were converted into lay bys for car-parking. Today, Bremen has 650 km of bike-lanes inside of streets, incl. stripes and advisory lanes, and the highest rate of bike-transport in cities over half a million inhabitants of Germany. More than 42.000 bike-trips a day are made into the city centre and one third of the trips in Bremen are longer than 6 km. This is remarkable, because the average bike distance in Germany is about 3 km and 85% of the trips are no longer than 6 km.

In the last years Bremen implemented a Masterplan for cycle traffic and guidelines how to integrate bike-traffic inside of streets as an important instrument to realize the measures of the Masterplan. A comprehensive infrastructure for cycle-traffic, and a dense and closed network of separate bike-lanes have led Bremen to become a “champion” city as for its cycling level.