Impact evaluation of a cycling promotion campaign using daily bicycle counters data: The case of Cycling May in Poland

The promotion of active and sustainable transport modes as an alternative to motorised individual transport has become a key policy priority in Europe, to reduce air pollution, road congestion, noise, traffic injuries, and the adverse health outcomes of sedentary lifestyles. Policymakers are implementing a wide range of measures to encourage this shift in attitudes and behaviours. These interventions are most valuable when targeting children and young people, as they weigh in habit formation and result in longer term benefits. More specifically, soft transport policies include measures like informational and educational campaigns, marketing techniques, personalized services and incentives. Among this type of policies, the gamification approach based on a competition mechanism and relative reward is applied to promote cycling behaviour, especially directed towards children. In this study we evaluate the Cycling May policy, a wide campaign aimed at promoting commuting to school by bicycle and implemented in several cities in Poland, and targeting schoolchildren and their families. We apply a quasi-experimental design based on observed daily bicycle counts on bicycle lanes in the targeted city of Gdansk and in a control city, over a three-years period. Estimates from a difference-in-difference panel regression show that the policy generated a 18% average increase in daily bicycle traffic. Despite the positive estimated effect during the intervention, our findings suggest that the behavioural change is not sustained after the intervention ends, consistently with findings from similar research.