This is the story of how the cycling association measured streets in Bruges and got what they wanted - a cycling zone - 5 years after the initial campaign…

The setup

First some belgian road law. One of the peculariaties of Belgian is that we have the concept of a ‘cyclestreet’. This is a street where cars are not allowed to overtake cyclists - one of the tools to make cities more liveable. A cycle zone is similar, except that it is about multiple streets. It needs different traffic signs and is in effect until the “end of cycle zone”-traffic sign.

The cycling association of Bruges wanted a cycling zone in the entire city center. To force this, they devised a plan using a different law. The Belgian road code says that cars are not allowed to overtake a cyclist if the space between a cyclist and the car would be less then 1 meter.

In other words, if the cycling association could prove that most of the streets in Bruges are too small to legally overtake cyclists anyway, that would be a good starting point to force a cycle zone in the city. In practice, it would make the already existing situation more explicit.

Enter OpenStreetMap

As such, the local cyclist association asked me to help them in 2020, in the middle of the corona lockdowns.

I did create a custom version of StreetComplete to ask for the street width (a quest that StreetComplete would officially add about a year later).

And, as such, we got out into the city and, armed with a laser measurement device, took the width of every street in the historic center - a perfect activity to do during the corona lockdowns.

To display the information, I setup a custom map theme on MapComplete (which was quite young as well) to show the widths of the streets.

Using the measured width, parking and sidewalk information, MapComplete can automatically determine which streets are to small to officially overtake a cyclist.

As an extra advantage: the average width of a car - and thus the needed width for a parking lane or driving lane - can be set by me (the programmer) and updated later on if needed. Sadly, cars are getting wider year after year which means that the necessary road width is increasing too…

Political lobbying

With this visualisation in hand, the cycling association started lobbying. This was asked at the council, with a little press release and action as well (article in Dutch). and information on their own website (Dutch).

At first, nothing happened. Some juridical-technical excuses were used, but the seed was planted in the hearts and minds. It started growing, albeit slowly.

It took nearly three years for the first result of our action to be implemented: the oldest part the city was turned into a cycle zone, containing around 90 streets (article in Dutch). - a first victory.

And now - five years later - the idea has spread and the small cycle zone has grown tremendously. Nearly all streets in the city center have been made part of the cycling zone as of the 1st october 2025.

In every political decision, the visualisation of the OSM data played a pivotal role - proving to lawmakers and police forces that the cycle zone is a hard necessity. The data painted a clear, hard to ignore picture which resulted in actual political change.

So, to all fellow mappers: keep up the good work!