Livable Cities - London AMPS | City, University of London Page 210 Case A: Munich’s Pop-up bike lanes Figure 23. Pop-up Bike Lane Elisenstrasse, Munich 2020; Photo: Florian Peljak Background and implementation During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Munich City Council approved the implementation of pop-up bike lanes to temporarily allocate more space to bicycle traffic at the expense of car lanes. The surge in bicycle traffic, evident from a 20 percent increase recorded in April 2020 compared to the previous year at the six permanent counting stations in Munich, prompted the initiation of the traffic experiment.19 initiated by two party factions and approved by the city council based on a proposal prepared by the Planning and Building Administration. The strategy was to set up the pop-up bike lanes temporarily until the end of October 2020 and gather feedback to present to the city council in a new proposal, along with recommendations for further long-term actions. These temporary measures were implemented in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the proposal explicitly stated that they 'do not constitute a preemption of future final solutions’.20 Located on five heavily trafficked streets, Elisenstraße, Theresienstraße, Gabelsbergerstraße, Zweibrückenstraße, and Rosenheimer Straße, the bike lanes were realized within several weeks after approval. Despite a contrary city council proposal from opposition parties and protests from cycling activists, the measures were reversed as planned at the beginning of November.21 In the subsequent phase, the participation process was carried out to gather insights from public agencies and institutions, as well as to obtain the opinions of citizens. Based on this, the city council decided in March 2021 to permanently establish the bike lanes and had them implemented until May.22 Objectives and expected outcomes The Covid pop-up bike lanes aimed to show how a transportation transistion can be implemented quickly and reversibly, avoiding premature, costly decisions. Permanent implementation would be decided after evaluating the measures and completing the participation process. Participation and experimentation process The experiment was politically initiated and administratively implemented, making it a “top-down” project from a process logic perspective. However, it aligned with the goals of the grassroots cycling initiative that gathered 160,000 citizen signatures during the referendum. The political and administrative actions thus reflected the public will. Traffic data, resident feedback, input from district committees, police, and public transportation were analyzed. Two digital public events, engaging around 500 citizens, were also held to discuss future implementations.23 In addition, over 7,000 online questionnaires were analysed (n=7,117): almost 70% of the surveyed people were in favour of making pop-up bike lanes permanent.
