Free Surprise Breakfast for Szeged’s Bikers: Thirty Thousand Choose Cycling in Szeged Every Day
Bikers were given a cup of tea and savoury scones after 7 in the morning at Stefánia, the city’s busiest bike path. A lot of bikers hit the road early in the morning. Many showed an interest in the action as, according to statistics, nearly 30 thousand people use the bicycle in Szeged on a daily basis – proving that life is possible without a car.
I love cycling but only if the weather is nice. When it rains or turns cold, I change. I cycle to the city centre from Petőfitelep, which is in the outskirts. This means of transport is not only healthy and environmentally friendly but, in the morning peak, it is also faster than a car – said Edit Lovasné Bartha.
Ágnes, who commutes from Tarján District to Ady Square, also confirms that cycling is much faster than driving in the mornings. From Csillag Square, which is in her district, it takes her forty minutes to get to work by car in the morning peak – the same route is half the time by bike.
Vice Mayor Sándor Nagy also arrived at Stefánia by bike. This is not unusual of him: when the weather is good, he regularly travels from Szőreg District to the City Hall by bicycle.
The route is exactly twenty-one minutes. It takes three minutes to cycle over the City Centre Bridge – by car, it is several times longer. And this is healthy, too.
Between seven and quarter to eight in the morning, cyclists came in groups of 150-200 almost without a halt. The majority stopped for a quick cyclist breakfast.
We have brought two hundred packages of tea and savoury scones, each also containing a chocolate coated curd snack and a colour brochure. These are handed out to cyclists – said Balázs Gulyás (see in the first picture), while handing out the packages without a break.
No wonder the breakfast service team was so busy: Szeged has been the city with the most biking days in Hungary for years.
Szeged’s bicycle users won last year’s spring and autumn Bike to work! national campaign rounds by far – the cities of Debrecen and Székesfehérvár lagging behind in the second and third places. Between 9-22 September last year, in two weeks, registered campaign participants from Szeged collected over 1,300 days of biking. The competition also revealed that the number of “biking days” per inhabitant is more than 123 in Szeged, this number being only 101 in Budapest.
Szeged is thus not only the most biking city but also the city with the most biking kilometres in Hungary.
Learn more about it here!
Urban mobility
