Norway Is Investing Nearly $1 Billion in Bike Highways

Norway has just made a serious commitment to becoming more bike-friendly. The Scandinavian country recently announced a plan that includes spending $923 million on wide, two-lane bike highways in and around their largest cities in an effort to cut carbon emissions in half, City Lab reports.

Roads built exclusively for bikes are beginning to gain traction across Europe. Unlike supplementary bike lanes added onto roads built for cars, bike highways allow cyclists to travel faster and more safely than ever before. The 10 new "super cycleways" will link bikers commuting from the suburbs to the centers of nine cities across Norway. With the freedom to reach speeds up of up to 25 miles per hour, the government is hoping more commuters will choose to travel by bike than would have otherwise.

The bike highways are just one component of Norway's grand scheme to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. In the next three years, the center of Norway's capital of Oslo will be completely car-free, making it the first European capital to permanently ban automobiles. By 2030, Norway is aiming for 75 percent of their buses and 50 percent of their trucks to be low-emission and for 10 to 20 percent of all journeys to be made by bike.

[h/t City Lab]