"Nine months after learning the results of the audit of the city's cycling network, and having refused several times to distribute the study to council members, the vice-president of the Lisbon City Council presented some of this information in a disjointed and decontextualised way at a press conference held today", criticises the PS council, in a note sent to the Lusa agency.

At issue is the Lisbon municipal cycling plan, presented this morning by the vice-president, Filipe Anacoreta Correia, and which was based on an audit of the city's network carried out by the company Copenhagenize, whose interim report had already been released in October.

"It is the first time that the Lisbon City Council has not released a technical report, but rather the summary of the analysis carried out and reviewed by the services, in an attitude of secrecy and opacity that sets back several decades the policy of transparency and accountability that is required of a public body", accuse the socialists, who had already requested access to the audit, in April, to the Commission for Access to Administrative Documents (CADA).

According to the plan presented, at the end of 2025 Lisbon will go from a cycling network with the current 173 kilometres to a total of 263, with the construction of 56 more connecting cycle paths planned, with the aim of "improving and better connecting the infrastructure already built in the city".

The Gira bicycle stations, which currently number 150, will also number 190 at the end of 2025, with 1,900 bicycles, 1,800 of which are electric, and will reach 24 parishes.

The plan also includes two million euros to connect schools to the cycling network, in addition to the 400 thousand euros that the municipality received as financial support from the BICI Bloomberg Programme to connect cycle paths to 20 schools, with a coverage of 20 thousand students.

In total, it is estimated that around 13 million euros will be invested in the implementation of this plan.

For the PS, the expansion plan of the cycling network reveals "a lack of ambition" and an outdated vision: "None of the suggestions from what is known about the audit are followed and, with almost half of the kilometres announced taking place in Monsanto, it is a return to a model in which the cycling network is not seen as an element of mobility, but of leisure."

The party points out the "setback in terms of safety" and criticises the leadership of the executive for giving up on several projects.

"The PS councillors cannot fail to point out the gross error that is the abandonment of the construction of cycle paths in important connecting areas, such as Avenida de Roma, which would allow the uninterrupted connection of Lumiar to the city centre, or Avenida da Igreja and Gago Coutinho", they point out.

The Livre/Lisboa party also criticised the capital's cycling network plan, considering that "it is clearly insufficient to achieve environmental goals and objectives".

The party, which has an elected representative in the executive, questions several options, stating, for example, that "the largest sections proposed and added to the plan, since October, correspond to cycle paths or trails that already exist in Monsanto, in places where cars do not pass, and are therefore not urgent to increase the safety of the existing network".

In this sense, the Livre questions the carrying out of the audit, as it understands that it does not respond to the problems identified. "Almost three years have been lost by stopping, postponing or cancelling the works programmed for cycle paths, awaiting this audit", it criticises.

According to data released from the audit, Avenida Almirante Reis, Avenida 24 de Julho and Rua Prof. Pinto Peixoto (in Beato) are the roads with the most safety problems.

The analysis detected serious flaws in the city's cycling network, namely 30 junctions with problems, many discontinuities in the cycle paths and failures in the connection to 121 schools and five universities.

A survey of users revealed that two thirds feel unsafe or very unsafe at junctions, the majority see Lisbon's network as discontinuous and most consider the protection against motorised traffic to be insufficient, and that there are still many places inaccessible by bicycle, namely without Gira stations.

In general, the network performs well in connecting to the metro and trains, but with opportunities for improvement, the audit revealed.

Read Also: Lisbon will have 90 more kilometres of cycle paths in 2025, announces CML (Portuguese version)