Seville, Spain was chosen as the location of the 2011 Velo-City conference. The choice rewards the city for its success in very rapidly creating the infrastructure, programs, and “attitudes” needed to get large numbers of residents and visitors to use bicycles for daily trips around city.

In just three years, the City of Seville – having adopted the Master Plan for the Promotion of Bicycle Transportation (2007-2010) – created a fully segregated system of cycle tracks 75 miles in length and increased daily cycle usage ten-fold, from 6,000 to 60,000 trips a day.  This amounts to nearly 7 percent of all trips.  Thirty percent of these cycling trips replaced trips previously made with an automobile.  Many of these trips were made on one of the 2,500 public bicycles, which make up Seville’s bike-sharing program, developed by the same company that runs Paris’ program, JCDecaux.