Vienna’s Argentinierstraße: How a Dutch cycling street found its place in the Austrian Capital

Vienna has a rich cultural history, a UNESCO heritage listed historic center and a big cycling culture. To help facilitate this, the city wanted to launch an innovative infrastructure project that would make the bicycle the primary mode between the Central Train Station and the city center. However, they didn’t want to get rid of car access altogether as resident access was needed as well. To assist this project, they called upon Dutch experts from our network participant, Royal HaskoningDHV.  

Cycling planner, Sjors van Duren and traffic engineer, Wim van der Wijk, were tasked with providing a solution that supported the many cyclists using this route every day. They came up with an adapted version of the cycle street, a widely used model in the Netherlands, characterised by its red road surface. 

We had the opportunity to speak with Sjors to discover the deliberate design aspects of such a street and how they were able translate Dutch concepts to a foreign context.   

This year, the Dutch Cycling Embassy celebrates its 12.5-year anniversary. To document and celebrate the global impact the DCE and our network has had over that period, we are highlighting multiple projects. This article is part of the series #DCELegacy. 

Interview with Sjors van Duren

Could you introduce yourself and the sort of projects you work on?   

I’m Sjors van Duren, I work at Royal HaskoningDHV as a consultant, trained as an urban planner and I work on a multitude of cycling projects in the Netherlands and outside of the Netherlands. Most of the projects that I work on are either development of cycling highways or development of policy documents like visions for cycling network development.  

I also work on the design of infrastructure where my role is usually to find the options and possibilities and then using my skills as an urban planner to think outside of the box and challenge the engineers to come up with new designs or adapt designs to favor cyclists. So, it’s a broad package!  

Usually, it’s in the preliminary stages so that could be either from the idea conception to preliminary or final designs of cycling projects. It’s mostly consultancy-based so I’m usually not involved in final details. 

Argentinierstraße in Vienna. Tell me more about it. What was it used for before the project? 

Well, it’s a very interesting street because it connects the relatively new Vienna Central Station with the city center. The central station has been in place for eight or ten years already. Whereas, before, Vienna had multiple main stations a bit like London and Paris. This connection is highly used by cyclists and was the place where one of the first separated cycling paths in Vienna was ever built. It’s a very unique street in that sense.  

The problem is that currently 6,000 cyclists are using that road on a daily basis and that the two-meter bi-directional path is no longer up to standard. It was not designed to accommodate 6,000 continuous flow cyclists, which you now see. So, the city approached us with the challenge: We do not want to widen the cycle path, we want to look at new ideas and new concepts. We see it as a neighborhood street where cyclists have the primary function. Can you help us to come up with a design which mimics a Dutch cycling street? 

The main issue was a lack of space in the current design and that was being exposed by the volume of cyclists. Thereby, safety was an issue. There was also too much car traffic on the road to really build it as a cycling street. So, on the network level a few changes were needed as well to reroute more car traffic to the arterial streets. 

How do you go about making a project where cars, pedestrians and cyclists are all interacting together? What do you need to think about?  

The thing about the Argentinierstraße is that with those high cycling volumes, mixing pedestrians and cyclists is a bad idea which causes friction and safety issues. This is important because it serves as a through route for cyclists. With the old situation, with the narrow cycle path at level with the pedestrian sidewalk, you saw conflicts between pedestrians and cyclists. Cyclists were using pedestrian space to avoid hitting each other because the cycling path was too narrow and tricky, and they weren’t allowed on the road with the cars. So, in the new design we put the car and the bicycle together, separated from the pedestrians. Thereby, we could make it a more attractive situation for cyclists and pedestrians.  

If you want to make a shared cycling street, you need to have a very deliberate design because mixing vehicles with cyclists is tricky. The main goal of this design is to reduce the speeds and volumes of cars. So, the base volumes also need to be in order. As a baseline, in the Netherlands, you need at least as many cyclists as cars which use the road daily. Preferably two to one ratio, so two cyclists to one car for a cycling street design to work. Then, you have the design factor where you put in requirements like:  

• Not making the road too wide, otherwise cars will start overtaking and speeding. 
• Not making it too narrow, otherwise people are not able to pass each other.  
• Make sure that the road is self-explanatory.

These all contribute to a functioning cycling street, and I think the challenge from a planning perspective and from a Dutch-Austrian perspective is: How do we translate the Dutch concept of cycling street to a concept which is applicable within Austrian rules, regulations and traffic laws?  

I worked together with a traffic engineer; Wim van der Wijk. He checked the requirements, the design requirements and whether it was feasible. Wim and I, deconstructed the Dutch cycling street design into loose elements: red asphalt, correct width, speed bumps, continuous sidewalks over side roads, curb entrances going onto the sidewalk and onto the cycling street, rerouting or car traffic, separating loads of traffic, using forgiving curbs… 

Then we could discuss with the designers and the engineers in Vienna, which elements are translatable, copyable and which aren’t. With this kind of design and design approaches people often say: ‘Hey, it’s a Dutch cycling street, but we cannot build that here, because of this, this and this and this’. That can be true if you just see it as a copy-paste exercise. But it’s a copy, deconstruct, adapt, then paste exercise.  

What are some elements that wouldn’t work in the Vienna context that we may see in the Netherlands?  

It’s a very small element, but it’s an element we discussed. What we do in the Netherlands is that, if you’ve got a side road, we make the sidewalk continuous. Moreover, we make sure that there are no clues for the car driver on the continuous sidewalk as to where he’s supposed to drive. So, we do not distinguish radii on the continuous sidewalk. 

The first thing that we encountered is that Dutch style continuous sidewalks are not possible in Vienna, because we need to have those radii visible. We kept on discussing. Then it became clear that continuous sidewalks as such were not impossible. but we needed to show the radii to the car driver so that they didn’t (legally) bump into anything.  

In the Netherlands, we don’t want that, because we want to confuse the car driver a little bit. We want to make sure that he’s really aware of what’s happening, and a visible radius just channels the car driver to where he’s supposed to go; which increases driving speeds. So, there’s a slightly higher risk that he goes on autopilot, from a mental point of view. It’s part of the bigger design; you can skip this detail.  But if you skip 12 of these details, then the Dutch cycling street concept doesn’t work. 

Was there anything that really surprised you when you were working on this project?   

There’s one which is kind of normal, but the city of Vienna is a very complex organization with a lot of departments and those departments sometimes work together, sometimes they take a long time discussing each other before things get done. So, what I found surprising in this project was that all the people participating were open towards our ideas and the discussion we were having to see if the cycling street design could work in Vienna. 

 The second surprise is the speed at which they were then able to move from a conceptual workshop to construction of the street. It’s already being built and rolled out, which is pretty cool to see. 

Do you see this as an innovation that can be implemented widely?   

First of all, you definitely can use this approach. So, our team, an urban planner and an engineer, have deep knowledge of the way the Dutch concepts work and how the separate parts interact with each other. We used that knowledge to break down those elements. I think that approach can be translated to places all around the world. But the same goes here as what I said earlier: Do not blindly copy and paste. 

If you are doing road design for cyclists, you always have to look and take the conditions and circumstances into account. And there is a risk if you do standardised design, then you might come up with something too quickly, too rashly, and not take, for example, the number of vehicles compared to the number of cyclists into account. And then the design won’t work. So, you have to find a balance. But I think the approach and the way we are working to deconstruct and transfer our knowledge on this is definitely repeatable. 

 The outcomes will always be tailor-made, will always be different. And I think this is very important too. And anybody who tells you: ‘I’ve got a design here that works, and you can build it everywhere’. He’s selling you wonder oil, as we call it.