Dutch Design Guide for Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge Design

As more and more people worldwide are living in densely populated urban areas the added value of cycling and walking as means to create more liveable cities is being increasingly recognized internationally.

The Netherlands has decades of experience building cycling and pedestrian bridges but there was no National Design Guide for this type of bridges. Therefore the Dutch technology platform for transport, infrastructure and public space asked ipv Delft to write the Dutch Design Guide for cycling and pedestrian bridges, which was published in 2014. An English Summary of the Guide (Fig. 2) was written in 2015.

To develop successful cycling and walking networks (today) we need to cross all kinds of natural and manmade barriers. Bridge design therefor often is more than only an engineering task. Bridge projects have many stakeholders whose interests need to be taken into account to develop an optimal solution for all.

To be able to take all interests into account designers and engineers need to thoroughly analyse the requirements of all involved parties and stakeholders. For this ipv Delft developed a method which forms the backbone of the Dutch Design Guide. The method subsequently analyses the requirements from the network, context and users which then form the starting point for the spatial integration and bridge design.

In this paper this method is explained.

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