The Economic Impact of Touring Cycling: Review

Abstract

The most recent published data confirms that touring cycling is growing and its annual economic impact is around 55 billion euros, becoming a tool for the territory’s development, by diversifying the tourist offer and creating new jobs. This development has led many countries to study the economic impact of this type of tourism (Mercat et al., 2011; Weston et al., 2012; Neun et al., 2016; Flusche, 2012 and Rajé et al., 2016).

With the purpose of getting to know this reality better, we carried out a review of studies that included scientific papers, statistical reports and literature review articles published since 2008, using the keywords "touring cycling "," cycling "and" economic impact ".

The analyzed data confirm an annual economic impact of 44€ billion cycling in Europe, with Germany leading the list of European countries with the largest number of cyclists, with an economic return of € 2,030 million (Weston et al., 2012). In France, the second largest bicycle tourism destination in Europe, 16 500 new jobs were created in 2011 (Weston et al., 2012). In a 2016 study, the EU Cycling Economy estimated that overall cycling in the European Union contributes an economic benefit of 513 billion euros (Neun et al., 2016).

But this phenomenon is not unique to Europe. In recent years, the economic benefits of cycling and touring cycling have been monitored in several US states and the results show that Americans spend € 67 billion annually on expenses directly related to cycling (OIA, 2017) and all businesses annually contribute to the US economy at around 110 billion euros, which generates almost 1.1 million jobs (Flusche, 2012). The growth of bicycle use is also having a huge impact on the bicycle industry. Thanks to cycling, the bicycle industry in Europe annually accounts for 5.5 billion euros in Europe (Palos et al., 2014) and 4.8 billion euros in the United States (Flusche, 2012).

Regarding the return on investments, several studies report that investments in bicycle infrastructure are rapidly amortized (Zovko, 2013; Weston, 2012).

The analyzed data reveals that touring cycling is a growing sector with a massive impact on the economy in countries where conditions for cycling are more developed. Touring cycling has even greater impact on the local economy than conventional tourism, with particular advantage for regions where tourism is residual or non-existent, creating new jobs and helping to fix the local people with relatively low investments (Weston, 2012).

Portugal, due to its geographic, historical, cultural heritage and mild climate, has an enormous potential to become one of the main cycling destinations in Europe. But for this we need to make some investments and implement measures that make our country "bike friendly", namely and as suggested by the study of Weston et al. (2012), to develop a cycle lanes’ network and their infrastructure to support the cyclist, to improve coordination and cooperation between government and service providers, and to increase the effectiveness of promotion and marketing.