Digital cycling infrastructure in routeplanners

Flanders has excellent cycling infrastructure, but it does not always appear correctly in digital maps and route planners. As a result, cyclists are often not offered the safest or most comfortable route. The underlying cause is that there is no recognised, authoritative data source for cycle paths: the government has for the moment no detailed digital cycling map of its own, external map providers collect the information themselves, and the government has little control over the routing advice cyclists receive.

For ITS Belgium, MORE LION studied two questions. Should the government itself maintain and publish its cycling infrastructure digitally, in a coordinated way? And how can it make sure that this infrastructure ends up correctly in third-party maps, so that route planners suggest the optimal route? The study builds on a stakeholder workshop held in February 2026 and on interviews with stakeholders. It looks at the Flemish register landscape (GRB, the Road Register and Road Register 2, OSLO and the Supra-local Functional Cycle Network) and at examples from the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom and current European standardisation work.

The building blocks already exist and solutions (Wegenregister 2) are being implemented; the challenge is to make them coherent and align the processes withing several government bodies and add a layer of governance to fit the pieces together.

The study ends with nine recommendations. Among them: link every ongoing effort to Road Register 2, anchor funding with a percentage norm (for example 3%) on new infrastructure that is allocation to digitisation of tis infrastructure, organise coordination in a consortium with a clear mandate, and build structural cooperation with map providers at European level, using the willingness of the Netherlands and Denmark to join an EU project. -> download the report here