About the Summit

A week that redrew the map of urban cycling in Europe.

In June 2007, more than nine hundred planners, engineers, advocates and politicians gathered in Munich for Velo-city — the world's leading conference on cycle-friendly cities. This archive preserves what they built together.

Browse the archive See the 2007 programme
Our Story

Munich, June 2007: a bicycle summit at the crossroads of policy and design.

Velo-city 2007 was the sixteenth edition of the European Cyclists' Federation's flagship conference, hosted for the first time in Germany. The Bavarian capital — a city of 1.4 million people where more than fourteen percent of all trips were already made by bicycle — offered a living laboratory for the week's discussions on infrastructure, integration, and the politics of motion.

Over five days, delegates moved between plenary sessions at the Gasteig cultural centre, technical workshops in the Verkehrszentrum of the Deutsches Museum, and on-site visits to the Isar river corridors, the Mittlerer Ring junctions, and a newly opened section of the Radschnellweg pilot network. The German slogan for the week — Radkultur auf bayerisch, "cycling culture, Bavarian style" — set the tone: a pragmatic, design-led, deeply civic conversation about how streets are shared.

"We didn't come to Munich to celebrate the bicycle. We came to interrogate it — as transport, as public space, as a public good." — from the 2007 opening address.

This archive collects the conference proceedings, technical papers, policy declarations and visual record of the week, so that the questions asked in Munich in 2007 remain in dialogue with the cities still answering them.

Mission & Values

Three commitments that framed the 2007 programme.

Velo-city has always been more than a technical conference. In Munich, the organising committee set out three commitments to guide every session, workshop and field visit of the week.

01

Infrastructure as public work

Treat cycle lanes, signals and parking as civic infrastructure on equal footing with tram, water and broadband — designed, funded and maintained by public authorities, not left to private goodwill.

02

Policy that follows the rider

Begin with the eight-year-old, the seventy-year-old and the courier on a 6 a.m. shift — then design regulation, taxation and street law so that cycling is the easy, safe, obvious choice for every trip.

03

Cities in motion, in public

The street is a shared room. Champion protected intersections, filtered permeability, low-traffic neighbourhoods and the everyday choreography that makes dense cities livable for people on two wheels.

04

Evidence over ideology

Bring the data — modal share, injury rates, journey time, air quality — to every debate. The 2007 proceedings committed to publishing counts, methodologies and contested results in full.

Host City

Why Munich, and why then.

By 2007, Munich had spent two decades quietly assembling one of continental Europe's most consistent cycling networks. The summit became a moment to take stock, argue, and set the next decade's agenda.

The Isar corridors

Twenty-four kilometres of riverside paths through the city centre, engineered for shared use in the 1990s and still the spine of Munich's everyday cycling network in 2007. Site visits followed the river from the Flaucher to the Oberföhringer See.

The Mittlerer Ring

The inner ring road carries 180,000 vehicles a day. Sessions debated how protected lanes, junction redesigns and a hard political boundary could coexist with a road that defines the city's twentieth-century form.

The Radschnellweg pilots

2007 saw the launch of the first Bavarian regional cycle expressway studies — long, segregated routes between city and suburb, then a novel idea now standard across Germany. The Munich pilots became a reference case for the conference.

A modal share worth defending

Munich's 14% cycling modal share in 2007 was, for a city of its size and climate, exceptional. Plenary sessions asked how to hold that number in the face of suburban growth and rising car-kilometres per capita.

By the Numbers

Munich 2007 in figures.

The headline metrics of the summit — recorded in the closing report and preserved in this archive.

930
Delegates

From 42 countries, across five continents.

240
Presentations

Plenaries, workshops, posters and field sessions.

14%
Modal Share

Munich's all-trip cycling share at the time of the summit.

5
Days

12–16 June 2007, from opening at the Gasteig to the closing ride along the Isar.

Organising Partners

Who put the week together.

Velo-city 2007 was convened by the European Cyclists' Federation with three institutional partners responsible for the Munich programme.

European Cyclists' Federation

Convener

Brussels-based federation of national cycling organisations, owner of the Velo-city conference series since 1980.

Landeshauptstadt München

Host City

The City of Munich's Department of Urban Planning and Building Regulation, led the local organising committee and field programme.

Bayerisches Staatsministerium

Bavarian State Ministry

For the Interior, providing state-level coordination on infrastructure policy and the Radschnellweg pilot programme.

Archive Curators

The people preserving this record.

A small editorial group maintains this archive, with advice from the original Munich organising committee and the European Cyclists' Federation.

Dr. Klaus Meier

Editor-in-Chief

Transport historian, TU München. Chaired the 2007 Scientific Committee and has led the archive project since 2019.

Anna Schneider

Programme Lead

Urban planner and former ECF policy officer. Stewards the conference proceedings, session recordings and paper repository.

Rasmus Jensen

Visual Archive

Documentary designer based in Copenhagen. Curates the photographic, map and route-diagram collections from 2007.

Lucia Vargas

Policy Liaison

Coordinates the archive's link to the city's Referat für Stadtplanung and to the European Cyclists' Federation secretariat.

Read on

Step into the 2007 programme.

The full session list, speaker biographies and paper abstracts are open to read. Revisit a single talk, or trace a single theme — from protected intersections to school travel plans — through five days of Munich debate.

Open the programme Explore the themes