Where cycling could grow · Kigali
PCT Rwanda
A planning map of where cycling could grow in Kigali and where to build for it, adapted from the Propensity to Cycle Tool and re-worked for Rwanda’s hills.
Building this now. Nobody is using it for real yet. First customers help shape it and get founding pricing.
The problem
What this is actually for
There is budget for a cycle lane and no evidence for which street it should go on.
Rwanda’s 2022 census asked no commuting questions, so there is no record of who travels from where to where.
Tools built for flat cities do not work here. England’s model, applied to Kigali’s hills, predicts almost nobody cycling at all.
A plan built on one set of assumptions gives one confident number, and it is wrong the day the assumptions change.
Who it is for
- City and district planners
- Transport ministries and agencies
- Funders of walking and cycling infrastructure
- Cycling cooperatives and advocates
- Built for
- Rwanda
- Runs on
- Web, Android
See it
Shown running, with provisional figures
The figures depend on assumptions we cannot check until Rwandan travel data exists, and a public map would quote them as fact. So we show it on a call, with the assumptions on screen next to the map.
What we would show you
- Cycling potential across Kigali’s 35 sectors under each scenario
- Desire lines, the route network, and the corridors worth building under every scenario
- Every figure as a range across three assumptions about hills
- The downloadable data behind the map
Test data throughout. Nothing we show you is a real customer’s record.
Where it stands
What is built, and what is not
The left column exists and we can show it to you running. The right does not exist yet.
Built
- Modelled commute trips between Kigali’s 35 sectors, built from census and business data, because no travel survey exists
- Routes over a 10-metre elevation model, so hills count against a trip the way they do on a bicycle
- Three scenarios: cycling today; “Rwanda’s Best”, which lifts every trip to the rate of Rwanda’s own best-cycling district rather than to a Dutch benchmark; and a switch to e-bikes
- A web map of cycling potential by sector, desire lines, the route network, and the corridors worth building under every scenario
- Every figure as a range across three assumptions about hills, not a single number
- Data downloads in CSV and GeoJSON
Not built yet
- Rwandan figures for how hills put people off cycling. Today’s parameters are provisional and marked as such
- Places beyond Kigali, which need real travel data first
- Trips to school, which need school enrolment data
- A rider app for a paid panel of cyclists, recording rides and hazards on the phone. Built, still in testing, not released
- Kinyarwanda reviewed by a native speaker
- A public deployment
The order these get built in is not fixed. It is one of the things a first customer gets a say in.
Be one of the first to use it
PCT Rwanda is not finished, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What early customers get is real influence over what gets built and in what order, founding pricing that we will not raise on you, and us on the end of a phone. What we get is someone telling us where it is wrong.
Not this one? The other six — or tell us what you actually need.