Pune Built Roughly 83km of Cycle Tracks. An Audit Found Only 11% of Them Are Actually Usable.

Eleven percent. That's the share of Pune's cycle track network that an independent audit rated "Good" - meaning a cyclist can actually ride on it the way it was designed to be used.

The audit came from Parisar, a Pune-based transport advocacy group, which spent 2024-25 physically surveying 35 kilometres of cycle track across 19 roads, broken into 77 segments of 500 metres each. It released the findings in December 2025. Beyond the headline number, two details explain why "Good" is such a small slice: 22% of segments have stretches where the cycle track simply disappears altogether, forcing riders back into general traffic to get around the gap, and more than half of all audited segments had pedestrians regularly walking on the track itself, eating into whatever width was left for a bicycle. PMC's own Environment Status Report for 2025-26 cites the same audit and names the same culprits - encroachment, obstruction, discontinuity, and rising traffic volume - as the core problems.

The city has known this for a while

None of this is a surprise to PMC. In December 2025, right as the Parisar audit came out, the civic body ran a large encroachment-removal drive along the city's main cycling corridor, timed ahead of the Pune Grand Tour - a cycling event the city hosts in January. Officials said similar drives would continue along other parts of the route in the weeks after. By August 2026, at least one specific stretch was reported back to square one: a Hitavada report described a neglected cycle track facing what it called "slow encroachment," with the enforcement wing ordering a fresh anti-encroachment drive on that same stretch, months after the earlier one was supposed to have cleared it.

That's the pattern - a drive clears a stretch ahead of an event, encroachment creeps back once attention moves on, and the next audit or news report finds the same problem in the same place.

Money is now attached to fixing it

What's different going into Pune Grand Tour 2027 is the scale of what PMC says it's planning. Recent reporting describes a proposed 75-kilometre cycle network and a ₹114.89 crore reallocation for road and footpath upgrades specifically ahead of that event - a budget line that didn't exist around the smaller 2026 edition. Whether that translates into cycle tracks that stay clear after the cameras leave is the open question the last two years of encroachment drives haven't answered yet.

Why this matters past cyclists

Pune's geography - flat, compact, short average trip distances - is genuinely well suited to getting around by bike, which is exactly the case for the city's growing bike-pooling habit. But that case gets a lot weaker when the dedicated infrastructure meant to make cycling safe is, by the city's own audit, unusable on 89% of the ground it supposedly covers. A cycle track full of parked cars and pedestrians doesn't protect anyone - it just pushes a cyclist back into the same traffic a car or a shared ride is already navigating.

Until that 75-kilometre network is actually built and actually stays clear, the honest state of Pune cycling is this: the infrastructure exists mostly on a map, and the traffic on the ground is the traffic everyone already shares - on two wheels, four wheels, or a seat split with someone going the same way.