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ld be then reality reasserts itself the gate slams shut and that third world is gone here we see how individual psychology mirrors dominant ideology as performed through governmental discourses almost complete and unwavering commitment to the car cracked by little rhetorical tweets and policy gestures looking in a more bike friendly direction as the interviewer it s hard to trust your senses here and the cold facts of the transcript don t easily reveal what you witness the optimism injected as someone momentarily dwells on individual and societal cycling futures questionnaires might capture these inchoate dreams of a different life better than less structured interviews but we know the appetite for this third world is there a recent british social attitudes survey found widespread support for the idea that everyone should be cutting down on their car use and most people disagree that individual action is pointless two thirds of drivers say they are willing to cut their car use and three in five would be able to shift from using the car on short journeys to cycling walking or taking the bus the overall climate of public opinion can be described as favourable towards a reduction in car use stradling et al 2008 153 other surveys show people want 20 mph speed limits and want cycling and walking prioritised over the car that people want change is unsurprising the car system structures their world and many are forced against their deepest desires and aspirations to drive in a sensible discussion i m sure almost everyone would agree britain s being choked by cars and wishes it could stop utility cycling remains a remote but real possibility despite the twin related processes of people feeling disempowered from doing it and urban space practically eliminating it people are dreaming even now even here among all the cars of being in a better happier place by bike change from cars to bicycles is closer than we think it just needs to be triggered if not in the ways we re trying to trigger it the biggest barrier is not lack of desire it s cynicism dreaming of a cycling future s one thing getting there quite another why get excited about something you can t imagine happening people glimpse a better cycling future but remain in perpetual fug over the driving present the car contributes to a de skilling and disembodiment of everyday life people s capacity to move through the world without a screen to protect them has been eroded as has the relationship to their own bodies that develops through physical activity talking to people about their reliance on the car you get the impression we ve collectively sleep walked into the current state of transport and on pausing to think about it they momentarily awaken and slowly shake their heads struggling to comprehend how the car s taken over life even the most car centric of people feels this jeremy clarkson s tremendous popularity is surely based on his ability temporarily to extinguish people s growing ambivalence towards the car so they can still sometimes bathe for a short sweet while in its unalloyed celebration so cycling sits in an alternative future even as current conditions occlude it cycling here is importantly symbolic if in the present people have lost control of their bodies homes and lives in the cycling future they retake control of those bodies take back those homes from the car and reassert autonomy over those lives the thought of cycling gives people a sense that things and most importantly they themselves could be different cycling s power is as the pivot around which life rotates away from a darker towards a brighter future but it s unwise to show unambiguous support for something with such dodgy prospects so enthusiasm for cycling is muted constrained by the understandable if also incorrect sense that things don t change driving s what we do for now people figure we re stuck with the car you might think this other world lying just beneath the cars is so clearly against vested interests it ll never happen you might say it s much easier for car dependent people to romanticise cycling than it is to get them on a bike but don t those responses keep cynicism the biggest barrier to cycling i think we should see the truth in people s hesitant halting visions of a better life and make ways to encourage and convert them into action though precisely how we do so is another question another world is possible and cycling is not just part of it it s a route to it cycling is repressed but barely it lies close to the surface this is why as i tried to say in a recent post i think we need to create more seductive visions of the cycling future to help people get more than a glimpse to help them get a sustained view of the world that cycling including their own cycling will create reference stradling stephen jillian anable tracy anderson and alexandra cronberg 2008 car use and climate change do we practise what we preach in alison park john curtice katarina thomson miranda phillips mark johnson and elizabeth clery eds british social attitudes the 24 th report london sage pp 139 59 tags car centricism cycling futures ideology of the car repression of cycling posted in cycling promotion cycling thinking 25 comments how best to boost urban cycling november 26 2013 i ve run out of time to do the post i d intended this week tomorrow i travel to bavaria to take part in what looks like a stimulating active mobility workshop so will instead simply note that a debate between david dansky head of training and development at cycle training uk and me is today published on the mobile lives forum a site well worth checking out in its own right david and i discuss why urban cycling matters how it can best be encouraged and differences in encouraging cycling between urban and suburban areas we were given tight word limits which is why our responses are so brief on the same site there s a video conference with the sociologist rachel aldred from westminster university exploring london s bicycle revolution so if you feel so inclined you can get a real sociological cycling fix read my discussion with david who has consistently been among the most interested thoughtful and respectful respondents to the somewhat contentious understanding walking and cycling research with which i was involved here tags barriers to cycling bicycle system cycling david dansky mobile lives forum rachel aldred understanding walking and cycling posted in cycling promotion cycling thinking 2 comments city cycling book review november 21 2013 i m posting below the review of city cycling edited by john pucher and ralph buehler i wrote earlier this year for the journal world transport policy and practice it s long but hopefully of interest to those concerned about prospects for city cycling across the world and the more people who read and think about and then act on these issues the better a tricky balance must be struck in thinking about cycling s prospects as an ordinary mode of urban transport on the one hand it s good not to be all doom and gloom but to offer hope that the urban world should and could make most of its daily trips beyond walking length by bicycle but on the other hand it s important to emphasize that cycling as a mass mode of planetary mobility isn t inevitable and that making it happen requires ambition commitment and work overall this book gets that balance right sure there s easy talk of cycling s renaissance across cities such as london paris and new york talk which seems premature too uncritical and rather naïve but then it s more important to show things can change even if they re changing far too slowly than to lose hope that cycling will ever effectively be centred in our political institutions towns cities and everyday lives no one has done more than john pucher and ralph buehler to popularise the cause and possibility of city cycling using what is elsewhere to advocate what could be at home in north america but also australia new zealand and the uk over the past decade and more pucher and buehler have argued that the english speaking world should follow the netherlands denmark and germany in becoming cycle friendly and they have investigated and shown how it can be done city cycling continues this project in an impressive way it s academic drawing together an international cross disciplinary collection of researchers who set out what needs to change for cycling to become mainstream but it s unquestionably advocacy too the case for cycling has already been made but it needs making again and again and it is made persuasively here it is glib but true to say that if every politician policy maker and practitioner with any responsibility for the organisation of urban life read and acted on this book we could move rapidly and radically towards a socially and environmentally much brighter future overall the book argues for cycling to be systematically embedded into global economy and society in the same way as driving a car has over the past half century been systematically embedded within north american australian and much of european economy and society of course this centering of cycling must be at the car s expense and here it sometimes feels like the ambition of city cycling s lead editor and chief contributor professor pucher is ahead of the book s other contributors for example there is some but on the whole too little interrogation of the role of the car s continuing dominance ideologically structurally spatially in impeding cycling cycling visions strategies and actions never take place in a vacuum they emerge from and are shaped by the context of car domination much current action in the name of cycling because it is insufficient for the job of mainstreaming cycling therefore risks merely perpetuating cycling as a marginal mode of mobility and cyclists as a sub cultural out group minor support for cycling reproduces cycling as a minority mode and isn t good enough only major resource re allocation away from the car and towards the bicycle can break cycling out from its current marginalisation at the car s expense the better chapters here make clear that cycling thrives in places where driving is not just civilised but more importantly deterred but there s no magic bullet city cycling argues effectively that consistent coherent support for cycling across all sectors of society is required in order to develop a bicycle system which makes cycling not driving the obvious mode of short distance urban travel countries such as the netherlands denmark and germany are well advanced over north america and australia in every important respect from allocation of transport spending on cycling to development of cycling infrastructure to land use and planning rules to driver awareness and cycling education nevertheless and for good reason issues of infrastructure loom large it now seems evident to the point of obviousness that new city cycling cannot be produced without the provision of a dedicated network of cycling routes of a quality sufficient to appeal to everyone pucher and buehler s previous research demonstrates this as the key difference between countries with high and low levels of cycling so whilst its message is undoubtedly broader city cycling s biggest impact might be in pushing us closer to consensus a consensus which is i think established across the scientific community but lagging across advocacy that the two main means of mainstreaming cycling are infrastructural first the taming of motorised traffic to speeds which make cycling plausible even for those the vast majority of people nervous about sharing space with it and second wherever that is not for transient reasons of political will done most likely on bigger and busier roads cycling s separation from and prioritisation over motorised traffic whilst the contrasts between cycle friendly northern europe and car centric anglophone countries seem to cry out for strong critique of the latter the book is unfailingly polite in tone given its intended readership needs to be persuaded rather than offended this is probably good diplomacy it does sometimes feel though that the passion which surely animates advocacy of more cycling and which helps explain that advocacy has gone awol so one cost of diplomacy is a certain tediousness in both description the netherlands is like this the us is like this and analysis the dutch prioritise cycling but north americans don t the book s impetus to convince more than explain also leaves some questions unasked but why do the dutch prioritise cycling whilst north americans don t what are the ideological and institutional blocks and barriers and how might they be overcome for similarly understandable reasons the book is generally upbeat look how cycling is growing and look how easy it is to grow it faster yet we know this is only one side of the story there are certainly good news stories but let us not be blind to the fact that across most of the world levels of cycling are either negligible and static or else quite high but rapidly declining and in those places cycling needs rescuing not promoting city cycling belongs to an emerging paradigm shift from a paradigm that sees cities built for and around the car towards one which sees cars as inappropriate and bicycles as far more appropriate vehicles for cities there s material useful to this transition here it s good to see kristin lovejoy and susan handy s exploration of cycles and cycle accessories for example we know that many bicycles are not really fit for the purpose of city cycling and it s refreshing to see that recognised also good are three chapters exploring cycling in different sized cities the small medium and mega cycling is sometimes dismissed by critics as more appropriate to smaller than to bigger cities whose populations they say should travel by transit not bike so it s a neat bit of advocacy as well as analysis to break cities down by size and discuss prospects and strategies for cycling at each scale the most fascinating glimpse into cycling is provided by the penultimate chapter exploring cycling in four mega cities london new york paris and tokyo the first three have seen much pro cycling hype and sometimes hysteria and large increases in cycling albeit from very low bases in contrast cycling in tokyo seems prey to benign neglect yet it s by far the most successful cycling mega city with relatively high modal share 16 5 of all trips we are told demographically relatively evenly spread this chapter correspondingly begs the more detailed kind of cultural investigation which is necessarily absent from the book but which is nonetheless well worth pursuing one of the book s big policy pushes is towards dedicated cycling infrastructure something now being pursued in london paris and new york but not tokyo so that using tokyo as a model of best practice in this chapter might almost undermine the main advocacy push of the book as a whole it would be a...
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