A taste of the best: part 3: Eschede

Enschede is one of the five nominees to become best Cycling City of the Netherlands in 2014. Chosen from a long-list of 19 municipalities, these five municipalities compete to take over the title of current best cycling city ʼs-Hertogenbosch, which was elected in 2011. I will make a small portrait of all five nominees and in reversed alphabetical order Enschede is the third after Velsen and Zwolle. Enschede’s big cycle bridge that featured in an earlier blog post.Enschede is a larger university city in the East of the Netherlands, close to the German border. With its population of about 160,000 it is the largest city of the province of Overijssel. The city’s main industry had long been textile production, but that collapsed in the 1970s and 80s.  Many cities in the Netherlands are compact and Enschede is no exception. Coupled with good policies for cycling this makes that cycling is an important means of transport in this city. In the Bicycle Vision of the city for the period 2012-2020 we find that Enschede choses consciously for sustainable mobility and tries to get people to make the shift to cycling to improve traffic safety and the liveability of especially the city centre.