Titelaufnahme

Bicycle traffic has becoming a lot more important in Austria in recent years and this upturn leads to a considerable role in the urban area as a type of mobility. In terms of reducing the motorized individual traffic in favor of non-motorized individ-ual traffic and public transport, cycle facilities have to be in much better conditions than todays. Vienna will have in 2025 more than two million inhabitants, which rep-resents for the transportation planning a major challenge. An urban city needs al-ternatives to the car and the emission-free bicycle traffic with low area consump-tion may be the right answer for it. The construction and preservation of bicycle facilities are subject to standards and regulations and depending on the local conditions there are different embodiments to accelerate. The focus of the paper includes bike paths and the combination of bike paths and walkways. The compulsory use of these is in principle still assured even after the amendment, but has changed in some matters since the 25th amendment of the road traffic act (StVO). The competent authorities were given the opportunity to decide to rescind the mandatory use by regulation. The relevant bike paths have to be subjected to an evaluation process of whether an annulment would be in accordance with road safety and some other parameter. In Vienna, there were at the time of writing this paper one bike path and three shared bike paths and walkaways with abolition of compulsory use available. Based on traffic counts to the relevant sites of bicycle facilities as well as surveys conducted on site, the actual status regarding the use of the roadway and bike path have been investigated. Additionally the cyclists have been interviewed on site to gain data about their knowledge, opinions and motives concerning the pa-per’s title. Cyclists’ uses the road lane in Austria more often than in comparison to a German study. Nevertheless, since the choice of taking the bike path or road lane is in Vienna not always allowed in both directions, lots of potential for shifting the bicycle traffic onto the road lane is getting lost. The cognition of the test per-sons on the abolition of compulsory use is not more than suitable, especially the knowledge of the relevant road signs is very low. The most named reason to avoid cycling on the street was the subjectively lack of safety. On the other hand, the acceptance of the new scheme was evaluated mostly positive.