Cycling on Colonsay

It already seems ages ago, but earlier this month we spent a wonderful week on the wee Scottish isle of Colonsay. It was a bit of a Lancaster invasion to be honest, with somewhere between 60 and 70 of us travelling up, and scattering ourselves across various holiday cottages on the island, which felt to me like Scotland in miniature – a bit of everything, including simply superb beaches, all within a very tight – and remarkably cycle-friendly – space.

You never really know quite what to expect – in terms of cycling – when you’re going to a place for the first time, do you? We were hoping the island would be cycle-friendly, but we didn’t know for sure that it would be. So was it? Mainly ‘yes’, with a little bit of ‘no’.

‘Yes’ in that there’s basically only one single-track road which forms a circular route of perhaps eight miles, and which has a couple of short spurs – to north and south – off it. These roads are very narrow, and drivers of motorised vehicles almost invariably go relatively slowly (rarely exceeding 20 or perhaps 25 mph), and take considerable care. And there aren’t that many motorised vehicles anyway (although probably a lot fewer than normal the week that us lot were there – one of the ferry workers commented that he’d never seen so many cyclists boarding the ferry .. it was great, I think we really did resemble a carnival procession!).

And the little bit ‘no’? Only, really, that – via an otherwise sensible and glossy leaflet explaining how to conduct oneself properly whilst moving around the island – someone (and how representative or not they are of a wider mood I cannot say) is spreading the suggestion that people on bikes should dismount whenever a car approaches. Thankfully most people sensibly ignore this piece of nonsense, but I suspect there’s a small minority of ‘locals’ who want to institute a hierarchy of road users on the island with cars placed uncritically at the top, and that these people therefore feel that they have some kind of right – even duty – to push past and very mildly intimidate the beautiful people riding bikes. But I must stress, this seemed – in our experiences there – to be only a very minor tendency, and almost always when we encountered people in cars, they reduced their speed or stopped completely, pulled over and gave us space, smiled and waved cheerily, and seemed perfectly happy that we chose to stay on our bikes and continue to cycle in their presence! (Although of course, we did also ourselves pull over to let cars past when it was polite and/or sensible to do so …)

With the hope that conditions would be good for children’s cycling, we decided that Bobby and Flo should have their own bikes there, so that they could really experience and enjoy riding independently on the roads. To reduce our usual mild anxieties about getting our bikes on the trains (Lancaster to Glasgow Central, then a walk to Glasgow Queen Street and another train to Oban), and so that we only needed to book two bike places, Sue and I decided to take folding bikes (Bromptons, borrowed for the week from work).

(For non-British readers, there are lots of issues around booking bikes and taking bikes on trains in Britain, which I’ll maybe talk more about at some point – though, for the record, we always take our bikes on trains in the UK and have never had a major problem in doing so, although that doesn’t stop us worrying – and indeed worrying – and taking appropriate action – could be one of the reasons we’ve never had a major problem …  That said however, our friends Anne, Martin and William took their bikes on train following the one we took from Lancaster to Glasgow – somehow or other there were five bikes booked onto this train, one more than is officially permissable; rather unbelievably, this ’problem’ resulted in the whole train being delayed for 40 minutes, lots of heated discussions between the train’s manager and driver, and finally, a stressed-out Anne, Martin and William being upgraded to first class and receiving complimentary breakfasts.)

So, cycling proved a great way to move around Colonsay. And how wonderful to see all our mates doing likewise. Unless someone out there knows better, I’d say that it’s perhaps as close as we get in the UK to somewhere like the glorious, almost utopian Dutch island of Vlieland, which we went to a few year’s back, on which bikes absolutely rule.

It was of course particularly wonderful to see all the kids experiencing such freedom by bike. Watching them cycling around so happily really forced the unhappy realisation of how constrained are their independent mobilities back home in and around Lancaster.

One of our Lancaster mates, Jon Mills, had arranged a football match earlier in the week. On Easter Monday perhaps 50 of us took to the island’s golf course, next to the little air field, split into two teams, and frantically kicked a ball around in storm force winds for an hour or so, with a final score of 3-2, golden boy Steve Archer scoring the winner (I hope to hear about that for years to come, over countless pints in countless places, Steve!). It was an absolute hoot! So, taking Jon’s lead and nicking the kids’ felt-tip pens, I created and put up a colourful poster on the noticeboard of the island’s store. It announced the ‘Tour de Colonsay’, one lap of the island’s road circuit, with a prize for all children who managed to complete it. After all, for little legs on little bikes with little wheels, eight miles is quite a long way, and the circuit involves quite a few rises and one pretty tough climb.

I had no idea whether anyone would show up, but it felt like doing my little bit for cycling promotion on the island. Fortunately, at 2 o’clock on Thursday afternoon the weather was fine. A few Lancaster friends came out, perhaps in solidarity more than anything, but it was also lovely to see many other people come along to take part, and we had a very enjoyable, convivial and relaxed ride.

So all up, Colonsay is a great place for cycling. Probably not if you’re a roadie, keen on getting in the miles; the opportunities for cycling on this little island are definitely limited, on the road anyway (there’s considerably more potential for MTBing). But for kids it’s really, really great. Meanwhile one of the tasks for those of us keen to boost cycling is to go to such places and not only to enjoy them as a break from the norm, but to use them as opportunities for reflecting on – and then working towards – making them the norm.

Understanding cycling …?

I realised earlier today that we’ve just passed the half-way stage of the project on which I’m currently earning my living, Understanding Walking and Cycling. This prompted me to look back at a short piece I wrote for our local cycle campaign’s newsletter, at the start of the project, and to reflect a little on the extent to which the reality, 18 months into the project, matches my expectations back then. Here’s what I wrote, 18 months ago:

Tory leader David Cameron emerges from his house with his bike, and sets off on his cycle to work. Perhaps he wears a helmet, perhaps not. Perhaps a ministerial car takes his papers, perhaps he carries them himself. What’s clear is that he’s made a commitment to ride his bike, and is doing so.

But what conversations, discussions, negotiations and decisions have taken place behind the closed doors of the Cameron household to enable him to make that journey by bike? Does Mr Cameron make all such journeys by bike, or only some? If only some, why those rather than others?

It might surprise you to learn that we don’t know much about the specific processes which get people onto bikes and out riding. Similarly, although we know that the vast majority of people –famous and not-so-famous, young and old, men and women – do not ride bikes, we have little understanding of the processes which result in all these people not getting on their bikes, and moving around in other ways.

There’s a very visible world of transport, and then there’s a massive invisible world underneath it, producing the visible. We can see people moving about, in cars, on bikes, in trains, on foot. What we can’t see is the processes which got them there.

A new research project based at Lancaster University aims to change that. It’s called ‘Understanding Walking and Cycling’. I’m working on the project over the next 3 years.

A sceptic might say that we don’t need to understand walking and cycling, we need actions to promote them. By funding research into walking and cycling, Government can defer such actions. So long as the Department for Transport is awaiting evidence of ‘what really works’ in getting people out walking and cycling, it can avoid doing some of those things we already know would get more people walking and cycling – widespread 20 mph speed limits, closing streets to cars, widening pavements, building high quality off-road routes.

Of course, spending a bit of money on thinking is an awful lot cheaper, and politically less difficult, than spending a lot of money on doing. But there is a sound logical basis to the project. We want to understand how different kinds of people make decisions about which mode of transport to use for short, local, urban journeys. These are journeys which we know could easily be made by bike or foot. Our task is to figure out the many, varied and complex reasons as to why different kinds of people do and don’t make such journeys by bike or on foot.

We’ll be finding out how people do things through actually getting involved in their lives, and attending to the details of their ordinary routines. We’ll be hanging out in their houses, accompanying them on journeys, discussing their reasons for doing this rather than that, probing their relationships to things (car keys, umbrellas, ‘sensible’ shoes, waterproofs, bikes, timetables, maps ….) which help or hinder them from moving in particular ways. Getting behind Mr Cameron’s front door, in other words. 

 

My immediate thoughts, re-reading this, are:

• what I wrote back then still makes sense to me, which gives me some confidence that both I personally and the project more generally are at least being reasonably consistent … (which I don’t think is necessarily a good thing, but I’ve also been led to believe that ‘proper academic projects’ are supposed to deliver what they promised at the outset to deliver ..)
• but much more importantly, also that a suspicion I had back then has only grown stronger, actually much stronger - namely, that we cannot understand cycling only (or even mainly) by seeking to understand what goes on behind the ‘closed doors’ of households. There is something out there which – my sociological tongue-in-cheek – we might call ‘actually-existing realities’; and to understand cycling we need very consciously and explicitly to observe those realities, and critically to consider the ways in which they might be inhibiting or facilitating people’s decisions to cycle, or not to cycle. So as I mentioned in my recent post about our Worcester-based fieldwork, Griet and I have been paying much more ethnographic attention to conditions out there in the transport environment. Our (preliminary, non peer-reviewed) conclusions will not come as much of a surprise to you, indeed will strike most of you as statin’ the bleedin’ obvious (namely, those conditions for cycling absolutely suck). But I must confess to feeling very privileged to be a sociologist getting paid to stand on street corners (a la William Foote Whyte, one of my key sociological influences), from where I can pay very serious attention to actually-existing conditions for cycling, observe how people negotiate their ways through those conditions, and move slowly towards a position, perhaps a year from now, when Griet and I, along with our colleagues, will be reporting and discussing our findings, hopefully with multiple and diverse audiences. Half-way through the project, and half-way through our qualitative fieldwork, I’m feeling pretty confident that our calls for fundamental change to currently dominant conditions – if we’re serious about promoting walking and cycling (and how serious different ‘stakeholders’ really are about that does of course throw up a whole set of different questions …) – will have very firm bases in empirical realities.

Incidentally, please don’t take my use of David Cameron and his cycling here as some kind of indication that I support the Tories. For my own conscience, I feel the need to say: I have never voted Tory, and I have no intention of ever doing so. Should anyone be in the slightest bit interested, my vote on May 6th will be for Gina Dowding.

Bicycle Politics: symposium and workshop

Bicycle Politics

Symposium and workshop

Thursday 16th – Friday 17th September 2010

Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

The major role and relevance of bicycles and cycling to future life seems increasingly unquestionable. On the ground, projects across the world are committed to promoting cycling and/or cycling-oriented subcultures. In both theory and practice, there’s a real energy and vitality to think about cycling differently, to carve out alternative possibilities around the bicycle.

But if cycling is enjoying a renaissance, it is also under fire. Whilst almost everywhere people are pushing for cycling, it also seems that almost everywhere cycling is deeply problematic – contentious, oppressed, discriminated against.

Bicycles, cycling and cyclists seem to invoke love and hate in equal measure …

Bicycle Politics, a two day event hosted by the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University, UK, aims to explore bicycles and cycling politically. By thinking creatively and critically, its political project is to help push bicycles and cycling further into the hearts of our cities and societies, to improve the possibilities for cycling to re-make our world, to assist cycling’s obvious potential to contribute to alternative, sustainable mobility futures.

To this end, we are calling for critical explorations of the political, social, cultural and economic barriers to current and future cycling, as well as for critical investigations of the ways in which bicycles, cycling and cyclists are currently framed.

We welcome all proposals for papers which fit under the broad heading of Bicycle Politics. Such contributions might examine:

•     Cycling and political economies and ideologies

•     The politics of cycling ‘promotion’

•     Critiques of cycling

•     Cycling and discriminations

•     Cycling and inequalities

•     Cycling, social control, freedom and deviance

•     Cycling, space and the politics of space

•     Cycling, social movements and social change

•     Cycling and identity

•     Cycling and the politics of representation

•     Feminist perspectives on cycling

•     Cycling and the law

The precise structure of the event will be decided later. But we anticipate the first day comprising paper presentations, with the second day given over to deeper explorations of the papers and ideas presented the previous day. Our intention is to produce an edited collection, Bicycle Politics, from the event.

If you wish to present a paper, please send title and abstract, by Wednesday 5th May 2010, to both:

Dave Horton – d.r.horton@lancaster.ac.uk and Aurora Trujillo – a.trujilloperaire@reading.ac.uk

We aim for the symposium and workshop to be free and open to all. However, spaces could be limited. So if you would like to participate, but do not plan to present a paper, please email us to reserve a place.