Public money spent on dangerous and hardly usable bicycle roads

Several bicycle roads have been built from a 50 billion HUF (~170 million EUR) EU budget – but some of them are unusable. After a few months of secrecy, the National Development Agency published a report about bicycle road development between 2007 – 2013 in Hungary. In summary, there were 773 partly or entirely bicycling-related projects, which resulted in 1670 km bicycle roads or other related developments. Generally, these developments are badly deigned, sometimes dangerous and hardly usable bicycle roads without any maintenance. Bicycle touring was not emphasized in these projects, so the improvement in tourism was not significant. Civil organizations helped out many of these projects. According to the State Audit Office of Hungary, 1 km bicycle road built from local support costs 31 million HUF (~106,000 EUR) in 2011, while EU-supported roads costs 35 million HUF (~120,000 EUR).

The original Hungarian language article was published on 14 June 2013. The text was translated by Péter Gyarmati.