The Best Cycling City in the World Is… Cambridge? What the Numbers Actually Say

A British city has just been named the best place in the world to ride a bike.

Not Amsterdam. Not Copenhagen. Cambridge.

I'm genuinely pleased about it. It's about time a British city topped a list like this. But I'll be honest: my first reaction was "really?"

So I've done what I always do when a headline surprises me. I've gone and read the survey, pulled the government data, and checked what Cambridge has actually built. Here's what the numbers say — the good, the not-so-good, and what the rest of Britain could take from it.

What Time Out actually found

Every year, Time Out surveys more than 24,000 city dwellers about life where they live. One of the questions is how easy it is to get around by bike.

Published on 9 September 2026, this year's results put Cambridge top of the world: 83.2% of locals said cycling in their city was "good" or "amazing". Montreal was a whisker behind on 82.5%, and Copenhagen third on 79.2%.

The full top 20. Source: Time Out, September 2026.

Time Out's own explanation is short. In their words, "flat geography and temperate weather conditions are largely to thank". They also point to the multi-storey bike park at the station, Cambridge's "cycle streets", and the fact that roughly a third of journeys in the city are made by bike.

All true. But before anyone books a train to go and ride it, it's worth knowing how the list was made.

How the ranking works — and what it leaves out

Two things matter here.

• It measures how people feel, not what's been built. Nobody measured cycle lanes, counted bikes or looked at casualty rates. Locals were asked to rate their own city. That's useful — a city where people feel safe on a bike is doing something right — but it's a different thing from being the best-designed cycling city on earth.
• It's one city per country. Time Out only lists the top-scoring city from each country. So the Netherlands is represented by Rotterdam, in 13th. Amsterdam and Utrecht aren't on the list at all. Neither is London, or anywhere else in Britain.

For comparison, here's the last edition of the Copenhagenize Index (2019) — the best-known attempt to rank cities on what they've actually built, from infrastructure to policy. Cambridge didn't feature.

Rank	Time Out 2026 (how locals feel)	Copenhagenize 2019 (what's been built)
1	Cambridge	Copenhagen
2	Montreal	Amsterdam
3	Copenhagen	Utrecht
4	Shanghai	Antwerp
5	Vienna	Strasbourg

So the honest headline is something like: "Cambridge is the city whose residents are happiest about cycling, among one city per country." Less catchy. Still a genuine achievement. And as it turns out, the hard numbers back Cambridge up more than I expected.

The case for Cambridge: the hard numbers

Start with commuting. In the 2021 Census, 30.8% of Cambridge residents who travelled to work went by bike. That's the highest of any local authority in England and Wales, and roughly ten times the national rate of 3%.

Share of people who travelled to work and went by bike, excluding those working from home. Source: ONS Census 2021, table TS061.

One caveat, because it matters. Census day was 21 March 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, and lots of people were working from home. The ONS itself warns the figures can't be directly compared with 2011. Counted against everyone in work, including home-workers, the Cambridge figure is 16.8%. Either way, it's still comfortably the highest in the country.

Then there's how often people ride at all. The Department for Transport's Active Lives data shows 47.8% of Cambridge adults cycled at least once a week in the year to November 2023. Across England, it was 10.1%.

Adults cycling at least weekly, any purpose. Source: DfT table CW0302, final edition (the series was discontinued in 2024).

Two things jump out of that chart. First, Cambridge has been around five times the national rate every single year. Second, it hasn't fully recovered from the pandemic — it peaked at 57.5% in 2018 and dipped to 42.6% in 2021. Still, nearly half the adult population riding every week is a number most British cities can only dream of.

And a useful benchmark: in 2021, Copenhagen's own Bicycle Account put the bike's share of trips to work and education at 35%. Copenhagen measures it differently, so this isn't a like-for-like comparison. But Cambridge's 30.8% is the same order of magnitude — which is not something you can say about any other British city.

What Cambridge has actually built

Good feelings don't come from nowhere. Cambridge has quietly built some of the best cycling infrastructure in Britain.

The station bike park

The CyclePoint at Cambridge station opened in 2016. It cost £2.5m, holds 2,850 bikes on two-tier racks, and is open 24 hours. It's the largest station cycle park in the UK.

It's also a reminder of the scale the Dutch work at. Utrecht's Stationsplein bike park, finished in 2019, holds 12,500.

Sources: Greater Anglia; Gemeente Utrecht.

Bikes at Cambridge railway station. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Chisholm Trail

The Chisholm Trail is a north–south cycling and walking route across the city, planned at around 26 km. Its centrepiece, the Abbey–Chesterton Bridge over the River Cam, opened in December 2021 — giving cyclists and walkers their own crossing of the river, away from the roads. The Greater Cambridge Partnership estimates it carried more than 650,000 cycle trips in 2025.

The Chisholm Trail bridge over the Cam. Photo: Cmglee, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

England's first cycle street

Time Out mentions Cambridge's "cycle streets". The official version is still being built: Adams Road is becoming England's first formally designated cycle street, as part of the Comberton Greenway. It already carries around 3,000 cyclists a day at peak. On a cycle street, the bike has priority and the car is a guest — a very Dutch idea, arriving in a very English road.

Closing a bridge to cars

And then there's Mill Road. Since 1 December 2024, the Mill Road bridge has been closed to most private motor traffic. Buses, taxis, emergency vehicles, Blue Badge holders, bikes and pedestrians can all still cross. It was fought hard, including an attempted injunction. It went ahead anyway.

Why Cambridge rides

Infrastructure is only half of it. Cambridge has a head start most British cities simply don't.

• It's flat. Properly flat. No hills to put anyone off.
• It's small. A compact, medieval centre where almost everything is within a 15-minute ride, and where streets were never wide enough for many cars anyway.
• It's dry, for England. The East of England is one of the driest parts of the country.
• It's full of students. Tens of thousands of them, most of whom don't have a car and couldn't park one if they did. Bikes are simply how you get around, and plenty of graduates stay and carry the habit with them.
• It has people who never stop asking. Camcycle, the Cambridge Cycling Campaign, was founded in 1995 and has been pushing for better routes ever since.

Cambridge city centre. Photo: Richard Humphrey, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The catch: what Cambridge still gets wrong

It isn't all baskets and college railings.

Bike theft

Cambridge was, for years, Britain's unofficial bike theft capital. In 2019, 2,967 bikes were reported stolen in a city of around 145,000 people.

The good news is that it's falling fast. By 2025 that number was down to 895 — a fall of around 70%, which Cambridge City Council puts down to partnership work: 16 new CCTV cameras covering around 650 city-centre bike spaces, an access-controlled upgrade of the Queen Anne Terrace bike park, free bike marking, and Criminal Behaviour Orders against repeat thieves.

Source: Cambridge City Council (March 2026) and the Cambridge Independent, from Cambridgeshire Police data.

Still — 895 bikes is more than two a day. If you ride in Cambridge, you lock up properly. More on that below.

The congestion charge that never happened

In 2023, the Greater Cambridge Partnership proposed a "Sustainable Travel Zone": a £5 daily charge for driving in the city at peak times, expected to raise around £26m a year for buses and cycling. After 58% of consultation respondents opposed it, it was dropped in September 2023.

Which tells you something important. Even in Britain's best cycling city, the car is still very much in charge of the politics.

How Cambridge compares with the famous names

Here's the bit that put my "really?" to bed — mostly.

• Copenhagen: the bike's share of all trips was 21% in 2021, and 35% of trips to work and education, according to the city's Bicycle Account. Both fell during the pandemic.
• Utrecht: around 44% of trips within the city were made by bike in 2023, according to the Utrecht Monitor.
• Cambridge: 30.8% of commuters who travelled to work in 2021, and nearly half of adults riding weekly.
• Montreal: the city in second place, built on its Réseau express vélo — a network of protected express routes launched in 2020.

Every city measures cycling differently, so none of these numbers line up perfectly. But put together, the picture is clear. Cambridge isn't Utrecht. It doesn't have the scale, the continuous network or the decades of national policy behind it. But it's closer to the Dutch and Danish leaders than any other British city — by a distance.

If you want to see how the big European cities got there, I've written about Paris's 15-year transformation and Barcelona's cycling numbers.

What the rest of Britain can take from it

Most British cities can't make themselves flat, or fill themselves with students. But a lot of what works in Cambridge is copyable.

1. Park bikes properly at the station. A bike is only useful for the commute if you trust it'll still be there. 2,850 secure spaces did more for Cambridge than any slogan.
2. Filter, don't just paint. Mill Road bridge didn't get a painted lane. It got closed to through traffic. That's what makes a route feel safe enough for a ten-year-old or an eighty-year-old.
3. Build whole routes, not fragments. The Chisholm Trail is valuable because it joins things up. A brilliant 400 metres that dumps you onto a dual carriageway isn't a route.
4. Keep campaigning. Camcycle has been at it for three decades. Cambridge didn't get good by accident.

London is already proving this works. Its Cycleway network has grown from 90 km to 450 km in ten years — longer than the Tube — and I wrote about what London's cycling boom looks like in numbers.

Riding like a Cambridge local

If the Cambridge way of getting around appeals, three things fit it well.

The FLIT M2i — built in Cambridge

It would be strange to write all this and not mention that one of Britain's most interesting folding e-bikes is designed in Cambridge. The FLIT M2i weighs 13.3 kg — lighter than an electric Brompton — and folds small enough to take on the train from that very station.

See the FLIT M2i — £2,999 →

The Brompton C Line

Fold it, carry it onto the train, unfold it at the other end. The classic London-built folder is still the default for anyone combining a bike with a train commute, and it fits under a desk, so it never has to sit in a station rack at all.

See the Brompton C Line →

A lock that matches the theft numbers

895 bikes stolen in a year is a good reason to lock up properly. The Litelok X1 is made in South Wales, rated Sold Secure Diamond, and built specifically to resist angle grinders — the tool most bike thieves now carry.

See the Litelok X1 — £169.99 →

Over to you

So, is Cambridge really the best city in the world to ride a bike?

On the numbers, it's the best in Britain by some way, and it deserves its moment. Whether it's better than Copenhagen or Utrecht — I'm not convinced. But I'd love to hear from you.

Have you ridden in Cambridge? Do you live there? Is it really that good — or is there a city you'd put ahead of it? Leave a comment below, or reply to the newsletter. I'll share the best answers in a future issue.

Sources

• Time Out — The world's best cities for cycling in 2026 (9 September 2026)
• Time Out — The UK city crowned the best in the world for cycling
• Time Out — Europe's best cities for cycling in 2026
• ONS Census 2021, table TS061: method of travel to work (via Nomis)
• ONS — Travel to work, England and Wales: Census 2021
• Department for Transport — Walking and cycling statistics, table CW0302
• Copenhagenize Index 2019
• City of Copenhagen — Bicycle Account 2022
• Utrecht Monitor — mobility
• Cycling Weekly — Cambridge station's CyclePoint
• Greater Cambridge Partnership — Chisholm Trail
• Greater Cambridge Partnership — Adams Road, England's first cycle street
• Cambridgeshire County Council — Mill Road bridge
• Cambridge City Council — Cycle theft falls by 70% (25 March 2026)
• Cambridge Sustainable Travel Zone proposal
• Camcycle — about

Featured photo: bikes outside King's College Chapel, by Historyworks, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

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