Népszava Kinga Gál replaces József Szájer at the head of the Hungarian People’s Party delegation

The design of the lanes, the epidemic, the weather, the renovation of the subway could all have contributed to the growth.

BKK’s five publicly available bicycle counters measured 15 percent more traffic in Budapest in 2020 than in 2019, and 61 percent more in December. It stirred a wide-ranging debate when a bicycle lane was set up in the capital on the Grand Boulevard in the outer lane last April, thus narrowing the scope for motor vehicles, but the idea proved successful. Thus, at the end of August, the municipality decided that the cycle path temporarily set up in the event of an epidemic would remain usable, although it had been modified in some places. There may be several reasons why there has been an increase in the number of two-wheeled pedal vehicles in the capital: making the circuit bike-friendly is certainly one of them. We asked Áron Halász, the vice-president and spokesman of the Hungarian Cycling Club, about what else is behind this phenomenon. – Total annual turnover increased from 2,409,574 in 2019 to 2,771,710 last year. Of course, which device measured how much depends largely on its location. The most popular cycle path is the Bem embankment, where more than one million people have turned around, but the biggest increase was shown by the counter on Wefréd Weiss road in Csepel. There, the rise that began in April was steady, and it did not stop either in the bad, rainy weather of October or the arrival of a mild winter, nor did it even increase in December. So far during this period, there has always been a decline everywhere, the spokesman says. Traffic also increased on weekdays and weekends, last year’s representative survey with Median showed that Budapesters need designated lanes. The fact that Béla Bartók, Villányi, Tétényi út, and Baross utca also developed such a lot of traffic increased, so the network came together. The biggest motivation for the growth may have been the epidemic, the infection can be more easily avoided by cycling, skipping public transport. The renovation of metro line 3, the avoidance of inconveniences due to transfers, and the thermal renovation of Csepel may also have contributed. Looking at the age of cyclists, the age distribution is evenly distributed nationwide, so in a village there is no difference between the old and the young, while in Budapest there are fewer older people, probably more distances and more traffic. Nationwide, 68 percent of people over the age of sixty ride bikes. It is also more of a metropolitan phenomenon that more men ride bikes than women, the latter accounting for a third of cyclists. Median research also found a further decline in the proportion of those who never ride a bike, from 49 per cent to 43 per cent. There is no difference, however, in terms of political affiliation, with government party and opposition parties roughly the same amount. People would love to ride a bike, but in order to really get started, something has to be done against their fears, a designated lane or road matters a lot – we learned from Aaron Halász.