Collaboration, experimentation, continuous improvement: Exploring an iterative way of working in the Municipality of Amsterdam’s Bicycle Program

As demand for cycling rises, cities are scaling up their bicycle planning and infrastructure efforts. There is not only a knowledge gap to building this infrastructure, but also an organizational learning gap, as planning organizations are stepping into new waters. This research investigates how well an agile (an iterative, collaborative) way of working may be well-suited to address this through the case of the Municipality of Amsterdam’s Bicycle Program. We explore what this way of working looks like in the bicycle planning context through the stories of Amsterdam practitioners. This is done through 12 semi-structured interviews and 2 narrative interviews with process mapping exercises, the latter of which explore one project in more detail: an intervention at the Alexanderplein intersection. In the Alexanderplein project, collaboration, experimentation, and analysis were tightly connected and enabled learning by the municipality. We present how the way of working in this project and in the Bicycle Program as a whole relate to agile characteristics, practices, and barriers, and we discuss the implications for planning for cycling.