Background During the United Nations General Assembly of 2018, the UN Member States agreed on 12 Global Road Safety Performance Targets to drive action worldwide to prevent fatalities and severe injuries. Target 4 establishes that more than 75% of travel on existing roads is on roads that meet technical standards for all road users considering road safety. Since the declaration, two questions have arisen to clarify where countries should direct their investments on existing roads: (a) how to identify if the road meets the technical standards and (b) where 75% of travel is happening.

It is essential to underscore that Target 4 explicitly includes all road users. However, especially in cities where the modal split is unfavourable to cyclists, calculating the 75% of travel routes considering all trips might bias the investments to continue to be redirected to more prevalent travel modes. Neglecting the travel demands of other travel modes, like pedestrians and cyclists, can intimidate new users and even deteriorate current travellers’ road safety conditions. The lack of safe infrastructure has been documented as a critical barrier for cyclists in studies around the globe.

Objective This study aims to pinpoint the routes constituting 75% of travel for cyclists, comparing them with other modes, analysing potential gender-based variations, and assessing the safety of roads for cyclists.

Methods The analyses are built on origin-destination data collected in the city of São Paulo (RSMP) 2017. The cyclists’ routes were identified using the OpenRouteService tool on the software QGIS.

Results Route-generated links were ranked by the highest number of passing routes and the links with the 75% of travels per mode were identified and compared with the cyclists’ map.

Conclusions The cyclist maps were also compared by gender, highlighting the differences in the origin and destination locations for men and women. Finally, where the road assessment results are available for the city of São Paulo, it was checked if the routes meet the Target 4 for cyclists.