Academic texts on cycling research are expanding rapidly. A dominant theme among these is the use of infrastructure measures to assist promotion of cycling as part of a movement towards sustainable mobility. Physical infrastructure is currently posited as the primary key to unlock cycling’s potential as a primary mode of sustainable transport. Individual studies rarely stand together to be read back to back, in order to allow comparison between them. The privilege of academic conferences is that they allow the attendee to compare and contrast different academic agendas and concerns of research ... More

Academic texts on cycling research are expanding rapidly. A dominant theme among these is the use of infrastructure measures to assist promotion of cycling as part of a movement towards sustainable mobility. Physical infrastructure is currently posited as the primary key to unlock cycling’s potential as a primary mode of sustainable transport. Individual studies rarely stand together to be read back to back, in order to allow comparison between them. The privilege of academic conferences is that they allow the attendee to compare and contrast different academic agendas and concerns of researchers, and to engage in conversation between them. This volume provides a comparative assessment of existing and historic struggles over cycling infrastructure. The aim of this volume is to bring a selection of those parallel voices together and to initiate that dialogue for a wider audience. It is argued that planning is one element of the operation, but what results is often very different from even the most comprehensive strategic imagination. Underlying this chaos however, is a lurking sense that the broader lessons of infrastructure provision for cycling needs to be connected with the political analyses of infrastructuring that derive from wider studies. The book concludes that infrastructures are in constantly in flux, contentious and contended. Furthermore, it concludes that politics is also embodied; lived out in the spaces of mundane and everyday travel.