How Seville transformed itself into the cycling capital of southern Europe @peterwalker99

Manuel Calvo bumps his Brompton folding bike along the last few metres of a quiet cobbled street in Seville’s old town, then though a narrow passage and on to a broad ringroad encircling the district. Suddenly, several lanes of cars and buses are zipping past, but Calvo pays no heed – we are on a smooth, green-tarmacked bike lane, separated from motor traffic by both a raised kerb and a waist-high fence.

“Here we are,” says Calvo, pedalling unhurriedly along the network he played a key role in designing. “I’d do a few things differently next time, maybe try and make the lanes a bit wider. But they work. People use them.”

And people do, in large numbers. They do so to such an extent that Seville, the capital of Andalucia in the far south of Spain, has become something of an unlikely poster city for sustainable transport. It is, proponents say, living proof that more or less any urban area can get lots of people on the bikes by the relatively straightforward means of building enough connected, safe lanes on which they can ride.

[Keep reading at The Guardian]