Have you ever thought, “I want to ride my bike, but I don’t feel safe on the road with cars.” Or, “Why can’t the U.S. be more like Europe when it comes to biking?”

While change doesn’t happen overnight, some U.S. cities are learning how to be bike friendly from Europe. A new study may help shatter the myth that the U.S. is stuck with perpetually low bike ridership. While nearly a third of the population in The Netherlands uses a bike to get around, most of that growth occurred in the last few decades when policies, programs and designs made cycling both safer and more common.

Germany and Denmark also looked just like the U.S. in terms of cycling, John Pucher and Ralph Bueler of Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy report (pdf). The pair examined how three northern European countries with the highest rates of bicycling managed to get so many of their residents on bikes.

They attribute the growth to these factors:

• Establishment of separate cycling facilities – especially along heavily traveled roads and at intersections.
  The goal is a complete, integrated system of bicycling routes that permit cyclists to cover almost any trip either on completely separate paths and lanes or on lightly traveled, traffic calmed residential streets.”
• Traffic calming in most residential neighborhoods
  Traffic calming is usually area wide and not for isolated streets. That ensures that thru- traffic gets displaced to arterial roads designed to handle it and not simply shifted from one residential street to another.
• Ample bike parking
  Local governments can deliver bike parking through local ordinance (like the one recently passed by the city of Cleveland) that requires parking lot operators to provide dedicated bike parking.
• Full integration of cycling with public transportation
  The basic: Transit agencies should provide abundant bike parking at train and bus stations.
  Advanced: German Railways has a “Call a Bike” program that permits anyone with a mobile phone and credit card to rent one of more than 3,000 bikes placed all over Berlin.
• Comprehensive traffic education and training of cyclists and motorists
• Events that promote cycling
• Better signs and maps