Bike-friendly Innsbruck

Within ten minutes of arriving in Innsbruck, Austria, I thought to myself, “Yep, I think I’m going to like this place.” It might have had something to do with the huge mountains that towered behind the city’s skyline, the turquoise river that I crossed after leaving the train station, or the park full of people enjoying their communal open spaces that I passed through on my way to my hotel.

But I’m pretty sure it also had a lot to do with these words that the check-in clerk greeted me with: “Oh, and we have bikes you can use for free. Just use your room card to enter the barn and grab whichever one you like.”

That was music to my ears. Because my knees were crying out for a break after my most recent lap through the Dolomites, I’d been hoping to go swimming. After I moved into my room, I look up the Innsbruck pools on Google Maps and chose what I thought was the nearest one.

Then, I gathered my swimming gear and walked across the street to the “fahrradraum” (bike room) where I found eight cruiser bikes in perfect condition. No need to pump the tires or check the brakes; someone was actually maintaining these things.

I hopped on a lovely, comfortable pink bike and began to follow the route my phone recommended. Within two blocks, I’d been steered onto a bike path next to the river Inn (the one for which the city is named: “Brücke” means “bridge” in German, so the city’s name is “bridge over the Inn River”).

The paved path was divided in two, with clear signage that told me bikes should stay to one side and pedestrians to the other.

This path flowed into another path, which delivered me directly to the pool in just ten minutes. “What luck,” I thought. “I actually chose the one that has a bike path to it.”

When I walked into the pool, however, I saw kid mayhem. “Can I swim laps here?” I asked the man at the counter.

“No, this is the family swim pool. You need to go to the Hallenbad Hottinger Au.” That was the other pool I had seen on Google Maps. And it was clear across town—7 km away. Ugh.

But wait, I had a bike! Not only would that make this trip possible, it might make it scenic and fun. I set out on the bike-recommended route my phone plotted for me, which, naturally, started on the bike path I had finished on.

And it stayed on bike paths for all but a handful of blocks of that 7km. For that handful of blocks, I was in a large, designated bike lane that was clearly marked and separated from vehicle traffic. I easily arrived at the pool, somehow figured out how to use the machine that sold entry tickets, and swam my workout.

When I was done, I plugged the hotel address into my phone and set out on a route that looked like it wouldn’t be on a bike path for long. And it wasn’t. Instead, it was on something I should call a “bike lane,” but it was so much wider than what we’d consider to be a bike lane in the US that I hesitate to give it that name. It was more like a car-sized traffic lane, and the asphalt it ran over was painted dark red, making it really obvious to all street users.

I almost got run over in this “lane”—not by cars, but by bikers. There were so many that, at one point, I had to stop and execute an alternate merge, as if I were using a highway on-ramp. All of the other riders knew where they were going, and tourist-girl with her hesitating ways was getting left behind.

I spent a good chunk of my time in Innsbruck working (the result of too much time playing in the Dolomites), though I did manage to go on one big mission into the mountains above town, taking a combination of the city’s glamorous funicular railway (one of its many public transportation options), gondolas, and chairlifts.

But I also spent a lot of time riding around on the free pink bike. It was just so easy and pleasant—and it seemed like everyone else was doing it too.

In doing some research, I encountered several websites claiming that 23% of the distances traveled in Innsbruck were on bicycle. I was unable to corroborate that statistic on any government websites, but, regardless of the accuracy of that number, it suggested that my observation was not wrong: It seemed like a lot of people were going places on bikes because, in fact, they were.

“Why aren’t there more cities like this?” I wondered. And I started to look into what Innsbruck has done to encourage bicycle travel.

I learned that, in 2020, the city adopted what it calls the “Cycling Master Plan 2030” that has “three fields of action: infrastructure, safety, and awareness.” It also said, “The core of the state capital’s cycling strategy is the expansion and improvement of the network of cycle paths.”

It was hard to imagine they could be any better, since they already far surpassed anything I had ever seen in the US. The city’s website states that there are 90km of “bike paths, bike lanes, and low-traffic designated bike route streets”—including a designated “cycle highway” out to the airport. Smart infrastructure is clearly a piece of the puzzle.

In addition, the city has committed to good signage. The pedestrian/bike separation sign was ubiquitous, and I noticed a variety of instructional graphics painted into the bike lanes themselves, explaining how cyclist should navigate intersections and other confusing spots.

Innsbruck has a bike and mountain bike planning mapping tool, called “Radrouting Tirol.”

Finally, the city has an extensive public bike sharing program (“Stadtrad”). A total of 340 rental bikes spread amongst 40 stations can be rented via a smartphone app or a voice call system.

And as if that weren’t enough, there’s an off-road cycling scene as well. I went running up toward the funicular one day and stumbled into designated downhill mountain biking paths—which, of course, were accessible from the commuter bike paths in the city.

After I left town, I learned that I had been in the neighborhood of some world-reknowned downhill singletrack, including the Nordkette Singletrail, a 4.3km long/1020m descent that is touted on the Red Bull website. (I should have worked harder to find a mountain bike rental. Oops.)

And that same Red Bull website told me about an extensive bike park in Mutters, a village just outside of Innsbruck (which can be accessed from Innsbruck via bike path, of course).

Yet, an Austrian cycling lobby’s website ranked Innsbruck third in city cycling friendliness, after Graz and Salzburg. They criticized the danger of “cycling in mixed traffic” in Innsbruck. So, Innsbruck believes it still has a ways to go, hence the master plan.

Part of measuring their success includes tracking bicycle use, which is being done through a live interactive map. I clicked on a couple of locations that had become familiar and saw in real-time the number of people moving through them on bikes. I could also see histograms of daily, weekly, and monthly bike traffic in those spots.

For me, the amazing railroad system, the comprehensive bus and trolley system, the funicular/tram up to the ski hill, the bike paths, and the downhill mountain bike trails and parks made for an impressive transportation and recreation package. I could see no reason whatsoever for owning a car in this city.

In fact, for me, getting around Innsbruck without one became a game. I started choosing random places to go (e.g., gear stores—since some of my warm running layers were falling apart after two months of steady use— and farmers’ markets, since I’d had it up to my ears with pizza and pasta after my extended romp through Italy) simply to have the excuse to bike there and see what there was to see along the way. One of my surprise discoveries was a farm embedded in the middle of the city, complete with its fresh milk vending machine.

I constantly wonder why we cannot get anywhere close to this reality in the US, why I continue to see people driving gas guzzling monster trucks with 4WD tires to the grocery store—and then leaving them idling in the parking lot. I know part of it is that our gasoline is less expensive. Yes, our government subsidies of the petroleum industry enable this inexcusable behavior.

I also know that, unlike European roads, many (perhaps even most) American roads were built for cars. Most European city streets were built for foot traffic, horse or donkey traffic, and wheeled carriage traffic and are therefore inherently not SUV and full-size pick-up truck friendly.

And I know that many Americans’ identities are wrapped up in their vehicles in a way that European identities are not. We are clinging to a “freedom of the open road” obsession that our previously vast western frontier spaces allowed us to entertain.

But the freedom I felt cruising around Innsbruck on the pink bike far exceeded any feeling of “freedom” I have ever gotten in a gasoline-powered vehicle. It was free. I got exercise. I saw more. I could stop and take pictures. I didn’t need to think about where to park it. And, I didn’t burn any fossil fuels—just calories which I was happy to replace at the “Bakeri/Konditori” with the yummy Bavarian donuts that happened to have a bike rack right out front.

If more Americans could experience how fun it is to cruise around a city on designated bike paths, might they be more willing to give up their huge cars and do more errands on two wheels?

We all know the shift needs to happen. It’s already happening in Innsbruck.