City Cycling

Yesterday Sue and Flo went shopping.  They went first into the city centre, from there to a supermarket, and finally back home; a round trip of a couple of miles. Because Sue planned to buy heavy groceries at the supermarket, she decided they’d cycle – it’s easier to let her bike carry stuff, in two rear panniers, than to put it into a rucksack and onto her back.

Sue pulled her panniers along with a couple of locks from the bike cupboard next to our back door. She also grabbed Flo’s helmet; neither of us has a firm, fixed perspective on helmet use, so whether our kids wear helmets for a particular cycling trip often feels like an arbitrary or intuitive decision. And we’re lucky that at least for now both of them do as they’re told!

Then Sue pulled their bikes out from the sheds; Flo’s bike was in one, hers in another (we’ve quite a few bikes between us).

They set off to town. Here they are about half-way there. Sue rides behind and out from Flo; this is how we tend to ride with the kids, in order to slow – and shield them from – passing traffic.

They’re stopped by the traffic lights just before reaching Lancaster’s pedestrianised zone; when the lights change they head straight into it.

They could park their bikes here; there’s some cycle parking sensibly located where the pedestrianized zone starts. But because they plan a looped route it makes more sense to keep their bikes close to them. So Flo scoots and Sue pushes through the city centre, busy with shoppers on a Saturday afternoon. It’s market day and with the stalls there’s less space than usual, but this is about as busy as Lancaster gets.

Flo chats away. They reach the cycle parking stands outside the city library and Sue locks their bikes there. I leave them here. As I said, they’ll continue through town to a supermarket, and then back home.

It’s just an ordinary bicycle journey. City cycling.

And so is this, a book about city cycling, called ‘City Cycling’.

Recently published, it tracks the supposed renaissance of city cycling, and advocates for more. It’s co-editors, chief contributors, and guiding forces are John Pucher and Ralph Buehler. They, and perhaps Professor Pucher in particular, have been relentless champions of everyday cycling. For over a decade their work has compared and contrasted the cycling situation in North America and Australia with the cycling situation in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. In doing so they illuminate what the former can learn from the latter, to make city cycling normal.

This book continues that project, using a wider cast of contributors. I’m writing a detailed review of it for the next issue of the journal, World Transport Policy and Practice. I won’t rehearse here what I’ll say there, but I will note two things which struck me as I read it.

First, it’s an important and hopefully influential achievement to pull together into one place state-of-the-art thinking, based on actual practice, about how to make cycling mainstream. It has academic credibility but the book’s heart is clearly advocacy; and I hope it’ll be widely read, and acted upon, by politicians, policy-makers and practitioners. Within this book is all the knowledge necessary to make the kind of journey taken by Sue and Flo yesterday the norm across towns and cities everywhere.

But second, I struggled with the book because it makes cycling seem so boring. Although strange and unsettling, this is I think a significant accomplishment. The effect built, chapter on chapter, is that city cycling is and/or ought to be nothing special. Humdrum. Much I suppose like Sue and Flo’s little trip.

As I say, this is an accomplishment and thus a compliment not a criticism. But I admit to finding it a little disquieting. Is it inevitable that cycling becomes less interesting as it becomes more normal? Or is it, rather, relentless advocacy of cycling which strips it of its meanings, or at least denies those meanings for a ‘greater cause’?

The book leaves me with a feeling similar to one I’ve sometimes had when discussing cycling with Dutch or Danish academics and advocates for whom cycling is much more ordinary, obvious and normal. For them, thinking about cycling correspondingly seems a largely technocratic exercise, about planning and providing effectively.

Cycling’s richness seems somehow lost in the business of getting more bums on saddles.

But if more bums on saddles makes city cycling boring, the sooner we make city cycling boring the better.

Bring on boring city cycling!

New book – Cycling and Sustainability

I just received my contributor’s copy of a new book, Cycling and Sustainability, from the publisher, Emerald. It’s a hefty and mighty impressive volume, with diverse contributions from across different disciplines and from around the world crafted together by my cycling research colleague and friend, Professor John Parkin of London South Bank University.

I met John for the first time back in 2004, when I organised the first of what’s become an annual Cycling and Society Research Group Symposium (the book will be launched officially at the 9th Symposium, at the University of London, in early September). John’s a chartered civil engineer and a professor of transport engineering, but – although I suspect he has sometimes felt slightly like a fish out of water – he has always been admirably happy to extend himself well beyond his discipline, and to engage with the range of social sciences, and this book is testament to his broad and deep interest in cycling, and the ways in which it can contribute to a more sustainable world.

I felt very honoured and privileged when John asked me to co-author the volume’s final chapter. This meant that I needed carefully to read all the chapters which went before, so I can say from first-hand experience that it contains some important and interesting contributions to our current understandings of cycling.

In our conclusion, ‘Towards a Revolution in Cycling’, we endeavour to summarise the key arguments of the book, but also to demonstrate how the different chapters provide strong evidence for how we might re-make the world in cycle-friendly and sustainable ways. So we are self-consciously ambitious and ever-so-slightly polemical in this concluding chapter, calling for cycling to be given far greater opportunities to contribute towards a healthier, happier planet. It’s well past the time when all the rhetoric as to cycling’s incredible potential needs assertively and earnestly to be converted into concrete actions, which enable it to enter the mainstream as an ordinary, mass mode of transport.

I’m copying details of the book below, so you can see for yourselves the kind of ground it covers, and decide whether it’s something about which you might like to find out more. At the very least, it’d be great if a copy could be found – not only by yourself but also by others – in the local library.

Towards a bicycle system

I’ve just OK’d the proofs of an article I’ve written with Professor John Parkin of London South Bank University. It’s the concluding chapter to Cycling and Sustainability, a collection of papers examining different aspects of cycling, written by a very impressive set of authors from across the globe. John has been working for cycling both within and outside of academia for a long time, and he’s done a magnificent job in making the book happen. (I am sorry about the price – this is academic publishing. But please, if you think it looks interesting and/or useful but find the cost prohibitive, do consider ordering it for your local library.)

Partly to announce the book, which will be published next month, and partly because I’m still thinking through our contribution to it, I’m here re-visiting and summarising just part of our conclusion, where we advocate for a global bicycle system. We argue that such a system is required for cycling to make a fundamental contribution to sustainability.

John will present a paper based on the chapter – so long as our abstract is accepted – at the ninth Cycling and Society Research Group Symposium  at the University of East London in September; and I might end up talking about it at the second Building Cycling Cultures conference in Leicester in June (we’re having a planning meeting towards this event on Friday, so more details should be available soon).

Cycling remains massively marginal as a mode of everyday urban mobility across the globe but its low status is beginning to change, and even to result in actual gains. Some of the world’s most prestigious cities – for example, New York, Paris, Barcelona and London – are beginning slowly to be re-made away from the car and towards the bicycle, and in the process the everyday lives and travel practices of residents and visitors are being re-made too.

In particular, cycling is becoming established as a key marker of a middle-class inner-urban lifestyle. In societies which have become saturated with cars, where inner-city living has become de rigueur, and where health and fitness have become key indicators of ‘a good lifestyle’, cycling has new kudos. Cycling is becoming ‘cool’ and experiencing a ‘renaissance’, particularly amongst affluent, white, middle-class, inner-urban professionals.

There is hope here, that the bicycle is finally being re-made as a (potentially) global cosmopolitan icon of sustainable urban life.

Isn’t this ‘the moment’ we have been waiting for – the bicycle’s second, this time sustainable, coming?

Yes, but we must turn this trend – which might otherwise be ‘a fashion’ or ‘a fad’ – into something durable; we must take advantage of cycling’s current popularity. After all, who knows how long the car would have lasted – perhaps only a few decades – had we not re-designed and re-built our cities around it?

Also, how democratic is the current rise in cycling’s status?

At the end of the nineteenth century cycling was the preserve of the rich and leisured classes in northern Europe and north America. Bicycles only became accessible to those less affluent when the rich jumped from them, into cars. Rarely in the history of cycling have rich and poor ridden side-by-side, yet for the sake of sustainability this is what we now must do.

But whilst the rich might be returning to cycling, the poor – when they have any choice in the matter – are not.

Whether you are poor in the ‘rich world’ or the ‘poor world’, whether the bicycle is perceived mainly as a ‘toy’ or a ‘tool’, it tends – even if it can be afforded – not to be a vehicle which is sought after, but rather one which is enforced and/or to be left behind. So the bicycle’s potential as a tool to mend our broken cities and build globally more sustainable lives risks remaining unfulfilled.

The bicycle’s capacity to infer distinction on the middle classes of prestigious global cities also depends on its continued exclusivity. The new-found status of cycling among urban elites is thus antithetical to its democratisation – loss in exclusivity will erode its appeal. The elite abandoned cycling once and could do so again, as soon as its capacity to infer and communicate distinction declines.

The bicycle’s popularity amongst one elite (the hardcore minority who currently cycle) and its growing popularity amongst another elite (the inner-city middle classes who are turning to it) cannot be translated into mass cycling unless we remove the logic of choice at an individual level by creating structures which impose it at a collective level. That is, we make cycling not just for some, but for everyone.

Only a system can achieve this social solidarity in cycling, because only a system can structure and institute practices which are independent of – or at least reasonably resilient to – individual psychologies and whims, cultural fads and fashions.

The indisputable benefits to travelling by bicycle within a bicycle system would not only enable the democratisation of cycling beyond an intellectual middle class elite, but also reduce the risk of this elite’s abandonment of cycling once its status as a privileged practice has been lost.

There is too much talk about giving people the ‘choice’ to cycle. This rhetoric of ‘choice’ constrains cycling; it gives the illusion that we can ‘nudge’  people towards cycling, when what’s actually required is much more wide-ranging and fundamental.

Modal choices aren’t chosen so much as structured, and they exist in systems which structure them. That’s why in a society such as the UK, so many more people drive than cycle, even when “it makes no sense to drive so short a distance”, and “it’s a journey which could so easily be made by bike”.

Most people in societies such as the UK and USA do not choose to drive a car. Over the last half century modal ‘choice’ has been eliminated as the car has become increasingly structured into people’s everyday lives as the ‘normal’, ‘default’ option. People drive because they’re part of a car system.

The dominance of this car system also explains why so few people in the UK and USA cycle. Many more people cycle in China and The Netherlands than in the UK or USA because the Chinese and Dutch have installed better bicycle systems, which embed cycling as a routine, everyday practice.

To embed cycling globally, then, we need a global bicycle system.

Overriding the capacity for individual choice, a bicycle system can convert what might be a current undemocratic ‘fashion’ into durable collective cycling practice. It can make, at least for short urban journeys, cycling the default; whilst driving becomes the deliberative, active, more difficult ‘choice’, the option requiring people to ‘be hardcore’ and ‘go against the grain’.

The tentative elite embrace of ‘ordinary’ cycling in some of the world’s most prestigious cities is a geographically and historically specific ‘moment’, one which provides us with an unprecedented opportunity – for the sake of both cycling and sustainability – to institute, and so make more democratic and sustainable, this minority turn to cycling – to make a ‘revolution’ from what might otherwise be a ‘fashion’.

Two quick points about the worldwide institutionalisation of cycling via a global bicycle system:

First, a bicycle system includes very many things – just like the ‘object’ of the bicycle itself. Such multiplicity is the fundamental and most important characteristic of a system. Any thing in isolation will have minimal, if any, effect; changes must be systematic. Within a system, no one thing is made to do too much work; there is no ‘silver bullet’. Rather all the components of the system work synergistically, together, to create a sum in excess of its parts. Building such a system takes time; it is an incremental project, but also a principled and a collective one;

Second, more incidentally, but something which is very much a ‘live’ issue in the UK – the question of whether we should adopt an ‘integrationist’ or ‘segregationist’ perspective when building for cycling loses much of its significance under the more encompassing task of building a global bicycle system. Of course, this larger task still requires us to consider, decide and lobby, in context-specific ways, for cycling’s ‘proper place’, but that ‘proper place’ becomes part of a far bigger picture, with the objective of getting everyone eventually moving by bicycle. Different places will devise and install different solutions – with different life-spans – in the process of incrementally building cycling’s centrality into the urban mobility system.

The development of a global bicycle system is a major collective project in which we all can, indeed must – even if only by riding a bicycle – be involved. (If you’re reading this blog post I’m sure you already are.) For anyone who loves cycling, these then should be exciting times.

Everywhere there is so much work to be done, for the sake of human viability on our planet, to contribute to a bicycle system. The ‘push for cycling’ must be broad, confident and powerful. We need new cycling infrastructure; new cycling stories; new cycling thinking; new cycle shops, new cycle repair services, and cycle hire services; new cycling-oriented maps, guides and websites; new cycle parking; more cycle-friendly schools, colleges and workplaces; new cycling-oriented cafes, restaurants and hotels; better integration of cycling and other modes of mobility, especially buses, trams and trains; stronger connections between cycling and other spheres of life, including business, politics, television, film, music and other media. We need people to cycle, and people to help, support and encourage others to cycle. Whoever and wherever we are,  whatever we do, we can contribute to the new bicycle system required to build a broader and better culture of sustainability.

In this bicycle system the ‘choice’ to cycle is not an individual choice, it’s a social choice – it’s been made elsewhere, by complex, overlapping systems making it the sensible – logical, rational, enjoyable – way of moving around.

We need such a system to make the bicycle the global vehicle of urban mobility, a vehicle not only of and for a new global elite, but irrespective of where someone lives, their social position, and their attitude towards sustainability.

We need such a system to make cycling democratic and sustainable

We need such a system for cycling to fulfil its massive potential contribution to urban sustainability.

Ride: a journey through cycling

A couple of years ago I rode from Land’s End to John O’Groats. It’s a ride which is both very ordinary, because so many people do it, and yet quite extraordinary, because behind each and every one of those rides lie magnificent stories – simply in order to cycle around a thousand miles from one end of mainland Britain to the other, you’ve got to be very committed; you need to plan and negotiate time out from the rest of your life, and then whoever you are, the ride is a challenge which you’re doing for your own unique set of reasons.

I had lots of reasons for doing the ride. Some were personal. My Dad had recently died. The previous few years had been marked by the intensities of bringing two young children into the world, and the stresses which that had perhaps inevitably induced in my relationship with Sue. I was fast approaching 40. I wanted time out. I wanted to think about the kind of man I was becoming, and the one I’d rather be.

Some of my reasons were less personal, perhaps more sociological (though check out the work of the great sociologist, C. Wright Mills, especially his The Sociological Imagination, if you want to think about how the two are connected). I was, still am, deeply interested in what’s happening to cycling. Cycling is always in transition, moving away from being some things and towards being others. I wanted to make a journey through cycling, and to get a feel for the state of cycling in the UK at the start of the twenty-first century. Riding this legendary journey would give me the opportunity to visit people and places of significance to cycling, to hear people’s stories, and to use them to create my own.

I rode with members of the Penzance Wheelers down to Land’s End, with Critical Massers through Manchester, on a recumbent around Edinburgh, and on a mountain bike at Glentress Forest. I visited the British Cycle Museum in Camelford, Sustrans HQ in Bristol, the Pashley cycle factory in Stratford-upon-Avon. I rode through big cities and national parks, and on as many different kinds of cycling infrastructure as I could – along off-road routes, dual carriageways and, obviously, miles and miles of quiet country lanes. All along my way, I met people who love, and live, cycling.

I wanted to tell a story about cycling, my own story about cycling, but one built out of many other cycling stories. I wanted to weave many cycling stories into a bigger cycling story.

I planned to write a book about my ride, this journey through cycling. So I became a madman, talking incessantly into my digital recorder, whether on or off the bike. I recorded my thoughts, and my many conversations with the people I encountered along my way. I made notes, I assembled my – in sociology speak – documentary evidence. Then I came home, impatient to convert my wealth of quite wonderful experiences into a book, and …., and began slowly to realise that writing a book is tough, surprisingly tough … Everything seemed to get in the way, and to be frank I was often absolutely rubbish at staying motivated in the absence of external deadlines. So although my book proceeded, it did so in fits and starts. And then, disaster … I went and took a full-time job!

Some chapters are written, most are more than half-written, and all are well on the way (to where, and whether it’s worth going to, I must leave others to judge). So I’m unhappy with the possibility that the book might simply stall, and then disappear without trace. If only for myself, it feels that there’s merit in continuing the process, in – however imperfectly – getting it done. So, as a recent convert to this blogging business and with the enthusiasm of the recent convert, I’ve decided to renew my writing efforts and to post excerpts, bit-by-bit, on a blog.

Today I’ve set up a sister-blog to this one, Ride: a journey through cycling, where – if you’re so inclined – you’ll be able to see bits of the ‘book’ gradually appear. The excerpts won’t seamlessly follow on from one another, they’ll be more fragmented than that – the point is to get me to finish the whole book, without giving the whole story away. My intention is to get a publisher interested in that …

As here, the writing will be a bit rough in parts, but as I say, doing it this way is a device designed to make me write. And anyone who might be interested at least has the opportunity to read my work-in-progress. Hopefully one or two of those people might even give me a little feedback, so I get a bit more of a clue as to whether what I’m writing has any merit beyond the pleasure it gives me. I’ll also be fulfilling my obligation to my Dad, in whose memory the story is written, and to all the people who talked to me, helped me along my way, and in so many ways and so significantly contributed to it.

Anyhow, if you’d like to know more, just click onto my other blog – Ride: a journey through cycling.