Guests: Ole Kassow, Founder and Pernille Vedersø Bussone, Director Cycling Without Age, Copenhagen, Denmark
Key Takeaways
- Treat Mobility as Social Infrastructure, Not Transport
- Most older adults who move into care facilities indirectly move out of everyday public life and into invisibility. Programs such as Cycling Without Age keep older adults in the rhythm of the city, not outside it.
Summary
- Purpose:
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- reduce isolation, reinsert older people into everyday community life, and create a shared civic experience
- the program also aims to convert older adults from being treated as passive recipients of care into active contributors with time, energy, and social value.
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- How does the program restore mobility, social connection, and joy of life for older adults who can no longer move around independently?
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- It provides trishaw rides for older adults from care homes or private homes, using volunteers as pilots.
- It builds local hubs and works through community coordinators so the program can be organized, repeated, and sustained.
- It creates intergenerational participation, including volunteers across different age groups riding together.
- It partners with care homes, municipalities, local businesses, schools, cafes, hairdressers, and social media networks to embed the program in everyday city life.
- It uses a decentralized model, so local chapters can adapt the program to their own context rather than copying a rigid template.
- It treats volunteering as a managed system, supported by the four pillars: quality, continuity, love, and culture.
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- Outcomes:
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- What began as one ride in Copenhagen became a program in 41 countries with roughly 50,000 volunteers.
- Older adults are often framed as dependent, even when many have time, energy, and a desire to contribute. Cycling Without Age converts that latent capacity into public value through volunteering, coordination, and ritualized participation.
- Volunteers, especially older men, gain purpose, companionship, structure, and identity.
- The program was associated with a higher self-perceived quality of life among participants and volunteers.
- A Danish public health study showed quality-of-life scores rising from 7.0 to 7.9 after participation.
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How can Cities apply these learnings?
- Use an age-friendly policy not just to reduce barriers, but to create reasons to be out in the city.
- Use mobility as a tool to rebuild participation by linking movement with loneliness prevention, care, and neighborhood activation.
- Treat social connection as infrastructure and create low-threshold opportunities for older adults to be outside, seen, and socially connected.
- Make intergenerational contact a core design principle: intergenerational contact can normalize aging, build empathy, and create social learning on both sides.
Interesting resources and readings
- Cycling Without Age: https://cyclingwithoutage.org/
- PBS’s Joyride series. https://watch.btpm.org/show/joyride/
- Starting and Operating a Cycling Without Age Chapter in a Care Facility. https://prod-ms-be.lib.mcmaster.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/1f3043ac-b23c-4f50-891d-7290ae47e435/content
- Jørgensen, A., Petersen, C. B., Eghøj, M., & Toftager, M. (2021). When Movement Moves: Study Protocol for a Multi-Method Pre/Post Evaluation Study of Two Programmes; the Danish Team Twin and Cycling Without Age. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(19), 10008. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph181910008
Ideas for future research
- Measure how Cycling Without Age affects loneliness, depression, and sense of belonging among older adults over time.
- Compare the program’s impact in highly cycle-oriented cities versus car-dependent cities.