Cycling Research Board Annual Meeting

While there is still considerable distance to go, Cycling Research has come a long way in establishing the role of cycling in sustainable transport, urban development and local economic planning. Research has helped establish and justify a whole toolbox of measures to grow cycling in differing circumstances. Less well developed is analysis of the political and economic trajectories that the expansion of cycling currently serves.
This paper casts a critical eye on the ways in which compromises made by presenting cycling as apolitical (necessary for broad acceptance) also compromise its capacity for transformational change. Building on the author’s experiences of more than 20 years’ work in policy formation, it argues that in a world where the status quo ante is one of social inequality and planetary destructiveness, research and intervention is never apolitical.
In particular, the paper focuses on the discourses of efficiency that urban cycle planning has utilised as part of its success story. Confronted by the realities of climate destabilisation and its clear links with overconsumption, promoting cycling as a means to increase the efficiency of the city (which remains a primary site for the reproduction of capital) through increased urban mobility, is somewhat problematic.
By avoiding questions concerning the direction of economic development, cycling research - and advocacy building on it - can easily be constructed as a handmaid of expansionism, divorced from issues of social and planetary justice. The paper thus calls for more explicit engagement by researchers with political and economic issues implicit in their work, and for greater recognition of agendas and norms embedded in the framing of research problems.