  The bicycle is a low-cost means of transport linked to low risk of COVID-19
transmission. Governments have incentivized cycling by redistributing street
space as part of their post-lockdown strategies. Here, we evaluate the impact
of provisional bicycle infrastructure on cycling traffic in European cities. We
scrape daily bicycle counts spanning over a decade from 736 bicycle counters in
106 European cities. We combine this with data on announced and completed
pop-up bike lane road work projects. On average 11.5 kilometers of provisional
pop-up bike lanes have been built per city. Each kilometer has increased
cycling in a city by 0.6%. We calculate that the new infrastructure will
generate $2.3 billion in health benefits per year, if cycling habits are
sticky.
