Laurent Cazor
I am Laurent, a French postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Denmark. I have been working a lot on the modelling side, and dream of bridging this discipline to psychology and sociology. My goal is to have a better understanding of the conditions for which cycling becomes an accessible and desirable mode for most of us.
I am actually a versatile cyclist, commuting 30 km every day to my university.
Session
Cyclists’ behaviour is still commonly modelled through infrastructure attributes such as lane separation, traffic exposure, surface type, or gradient, sometimes combined with socio-demographic variables such as age or gender. While these variables matter, they also have important limitations: their meaning depends on how they are locally defined, making results difficult to compare across contexts, and they remain only indirect proxies for what cyclists actually experience. Recent comparative work also suggests that, even after controlling for many material and socio-demographic factors, significant differences in cycling behaviour remain between contexts, pointing to dimensions that are still poorly captured by current models.
This research argues for a shift from infrastructure-centred descriptions towards an embodied understanding of cycling. Cycling is not only a response to external attributes; it is shaped by the interaction between the body and the mind. On the bodily side, cyclists expend energy to pedal, climb, brake, stop and restart. On the mental side, they must remain attentive to traffic, navigate the environment, anticipate conflicts, and assess whether a route feels stressful, manageable, or even relaxing.
As a first step, I develop a model of cyclists’ energy expenditure along the network, capturing how hills, intersections, and stop-and-go conditions affect the physical cost of cycling. I then outline a complementary research agenda on cognitive demand: how much attention cycling requires, how this may shape route choice or the decision to cycle at all, and under which conditions cyclists can experience a route as low-stress, pleasant, or partially requalifiable in time.
The broader goal is to move beyond the figure of the “average commuter cyclist” and develop tools that better reflect diverse cycling experiences across people, places, and trip types. This can support more targeted cycling policies and infrastructure, grounded in what cycling actually feels like at the human scale.