Velo-city — an annual conference for the cycling industry focused on developing sustainable communities — was held in Rimini, Italy, in June. The Brussels-based European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF) owns the event.

The conference has been held since 1980. While initially a European event and formally still owned by the ECF, Velo-city has been held on other continents and addresses global cycling issues.

This year’s event was attended by over 1,400 attendees from more than 60 countries. A range of corporate sponsors also supported the event, including Stava–Metro, Lyft Urban Solutions, and the FIAB (Federazione Italiana Ambiente e Bicicletta.

The Velo-city conference attracts active cycling advocates from commercial, policy, and research perspectives. However, it is not a “bike show.” It aims to position cycling as part of the solution for developing robust and sustainable cities and rural areas, and as a means of growing local economies.

Velo-city Returns to Italy

This year’s host was the City of Rimini, Italy, assisted by the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. The conference was last held in Milan, Italy, in 1991.

Rimini is famous within Italy as a beach resort on the Adriatic Sea and a conference venue. The city of 150,000 welcomes more than 1.5 million visitors a year.

Meanwhile, Emilia-Romagna, a region of 4.4 million, is one of the most prosperous regions in Italy and Europe, with Bologna as its capital, and has extensive engineering industries, including the high-performance car industry centered on Modena, as well as extensive high-value food production.

As part of the continuing development of the economy of Emilia-Romagna, cycle tourism is being developed as an emerging sector that can take advantage of the extensive historical assets, small villages, beach access, coastal plains, and adjacent hills that ultimately lead to the Apennine Mountains across central Italy.

Rimini’s Transport Picture

Rimini’s transport situation is unique. It is a small, ancient city with huge visitor numbers, who are primarily, though not exclusively, arriving for a relaxing beach holiday.

The city is also a major regional conference and exhibition venue. Thus, the historic city center is near miles of beachfront hotels for leisure activities. Development is very intense along the beachfront, but the city has encouraged low-rise, smaller-scale hotels, which perhaps spread the development along the coast even further.

The historical city is naturally composed of narrow, winding roads, typically two lanes wide, that run around historical sites from the Roman and medieval eras. The main railway station, located in the city center, provides excellent connections to Bologna and Milan, as well as along the Adriatic coast. Adjacent to the railway station is the main local bus/trolleybus interchange.

Throughout the day, the narrow streets of Rimini are extremely busy and congested. This causes issues for the bus public transport network, other road users (cars and trucks), pedestrians, and now cyclists.

The city has taken the view over the last 15 years that the strategy to deal with much of this congestion is the bicycle. This strategy also repositions Rimini’s tourism product and that of the wider region in a modern, contemporary setting amongst the offer of European resorts.

Bicycles — both personally owned and shared — are pervasive as a mode of transportation in the city center. This is somewhat unique for an Italian city. Bicycles are also widely used to access the beachfront from other parts of the city, as well as for leisure cycling along the coast.

The city has completely transformed the beachfront area over the last decade from a barren, sterile expanse of parking lots and sand into a multi-purpose parkland of beach cabanas, bike lanes, restaurants, sports facilities, and pedestrian zones that locals and visitors use extensively.

The promotion of the bicycle along the coast is no doubt contributing to more cycling activity in other parts of the city and region. Research indicated that two-thirds of the tourists in the city who use bikes stay longer and spend more locally.

The city also has a higher-capacity trolleybus system to meet demand along the coast, with two parallel routes — one along the main coastal road, which is being reconstructed, and another a few hundred yards inland, near the main railway line corridor.

Cycling: A Growing, Viable Option

Cycling is a large, growing, and ambitious business. Numerous issues were discussed in conference sessions attended by the author, at plenaries, and in private conversations.

Creating a narrative in cities that inspires citizens through the development of public spaces that include cycling is key. This has been seen in many cities around the world to create a more “liveable” city — particularly in city centers. However, “politics” does exist around the expansion of cycling facilities and use in many locations, and cities are having to manage complex and often persistent resistance to reimagining urban space.

Strong local political leadership for sustainable mobility solutions, including cycling, walking, and classic public transport, was repeatedly cited as key to reimagining a successful city for its residents. One quote from a plenary was “the streets need to be safe enough to make a choice…[to the car].”

In Italy, Rome is making significant progress in bringing cycling to the historic center, developing a culture of cycling, and improving the classic public transport offer.

An increasing number of European cities are removing shared e-scooters from their streets while maintaining space for shared bikes. This includes recent announcements from Brussels and Barcelona.

Velo-tourism is seen as an increasingly lucrative opportunity for cities and regions to grow the economies of visitors and residents by providing quality infrastructure, policies, and supporting services. This also promotes a more sustainable and dispersed version of tourism that can partially address some of the issues being seen in “over-tourism” hotspots across Europe.

Four European countries currently account for 80% of velo-tourism, an industry valued at approximately $52.3 billion. Emilia-Romagna sees this opportunity, but other emerging examples being discussed ranged from northern Italy (Veneto) and Poland’s Baltic Sea coast to Turkiye.

Certainly in a European context, but also in other markets around the world, trains, classic public transport, and cycling continue to work together to build multimodal mobility systems for residents as well as for velo-tourism. This often remains a challenge to implement effectively. Multimodal integration is progressing in many markets, but for many current and potential travelers, it remains a point of confusion, exasperation, and frustration.

Cities are rolling out shared bikes on a regional basis to assess the role of such services in suburban and even rural areas, such as in Munich, Germany, and Trondheim, Norway. In these cases, public subsidies are being used to fill a gap in the perceived mobility offer and to create a more sustainable transport situation for these non-city-center residents.

Moving East for 2027

The Velo-city Conference will return in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, Japan, in late May 2027.

This will be the first time the event has been held in East Asia since 2016, when it was held in Taiwan, ROC, and will further broaden the cycling debate and incorporate extensive lessons from Japan.

The author continued his habit of, where feasible, traveling to European conference events by train from London, UK, and in this case, breaking what would have been a very long day journey with an overnight stay in Paris outbound and Milan on return.

The 1,000-mile journey involved up to five trains, most of which were high-speed services, but with ample time to recompose at most interchanges and a very scenic trip across the Swiss Alps.