David Friel
What do I perceive whilst cycling through the city? How safe do I feel on a cycle path? What am I supposed to do when the cycle lane suddenly ends?
At TU Berlin, I'm investigating infrastructure from a cyclist's perspective. In my PhD thesis (Comprehensible Cycling Infrastructure), I am investigating how cyclists understand infrastructure and how cycling infrastructure can be designed to be intuitively comprehensible. Furthermore, I am involved in a project to research interactions between cyclists and motorists in traffic situations that are hard to interpret. In a previous project, I conducted research on the perceived safety of cyclists.
Intervention
Infrastructure largely affects cyclists’ perceptions such as safety or comfort (see e.g. Berghöfer, 2022; Zhang et al., 2024). In a recent study, my colleagues and I found that also infrastructure’s comprehensibility contributes to cyclists’ overall assessment of infrastructure (see Friel et al., 2023, Friel & Wachholz, 2025). And although comprehensibility is often mentioned in official guidelines, little is known about how to actually design comprehensible cycling infrastructure (see Friel, 2025). Thus, two years ago, I have decided to write my PhD on comprehensibility to improve cycling infrastructure to eventually foster cycling as an environmentally friendly mode of transport.
Submitting at a usual conference, I would now describe the study design (qualitative, simulator), my research approach (Grounded Theory Method), maybe some of the assumed outcomes. However, I hope this to be no usual conference. Instead, I hope to discuss the struggles I found myself in concerning the usefulness of research like this in general and my research in particu-lar: What is the sense of improving cycling infrastructure as long as reducing car traffic would be the solution in most situations? Is it worth aiming for improved bicycle traffic and, conse-quently, solidifying the narrative of streets as transit spaces instead of aiming for streets as social spaces? And how can one conduct research in the given research and societal system and strive for idealistic concepts at the same time?
Based on my research findings so far, I want to discuss these and more questions with other researchers who may similarly struggle between their daily work and their ideals. Discussing these struggles may help to find and/or strengthen one’s own position and to gather new ideas on how to approach a rather conventional cycling research topic from different perspectives.