Today most cities emphasize the construction of separate bicycle lanes as a sure path toward sustainable urban mobility. Historical evidence shows a singular focus on building bicycle lanes without embedding them into a broader bicycle culture and politics is far too narrow. Bicycle lanes were never neutral, but contested from the start. Based on comparative research of cycling history covering nine European cities in four countries, the article shows the crucial role representations of bicycles play in policymakers' and experts' planning for the future. In debating the regulation of urban traffic flows, urban-planning professionals projected separate lanes to control rather than to facilitate working- class, mass-scale bicycling. Significantly, cycling organizations opposed the lanes, while experts like traffic engineers and urban planners framed automobility as the inevitable modern future. Only by the 1970s did bicycle lanes enter the debate as safe and sustainable solutions when grass-roots cyclists' activists campaigned for them. The up and downs of bicycle lanes show the importance of encouraging everyday utility cycling by involving diverse social groups.
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Contested Spaces
Bicycle Lanes in Urban Europe, 1900-1995
Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze
Explaining sustainable regional integration to my parents
Zenyram Koff Maganda
sustainability. New transport policies in many European cities have both adopted environmentally friendly buses and trams and built bicycle lanes on most major urban roads. For example, Luxembourg has established the vel'OH program where riders can rent bicycles
From Victim to Villain
Cycling, Traffic Policy, and Spatial Conflicts in Stockholm, circa 1980
Martin Emanuel
shared facility was implemented just outside the Stockholm City Hall. In 1979, cyclists had their dedicated space for traffic in both directions painted on a part of the wide sidewalk. 82 In the years that followed, this bicycle lane was frequently and
Making Uncommon Sense of Laudable Research
Simone Dennis and Andrew Dawson
protected by full-scale vehicular segregation in the form of dedicated bicycle lanes and the like. In fact, cyclist accident deaths are, in Australia at least, of a considerably lower order of magnitude than for other modes of travel and have been for quite
In Anthropology in Action
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2023
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–11 (11 total)
Tension between Fast and Slow Mobilities
Examining the Infrastructuring Processes in Brussels (1950–2019) through the Lens of Social Imaginaries
Claire Pelgrims
some key dates, but the evolutions I am describing are iterative and sedimentary rather than straightforward. 40 Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze, “Contested Spaces: Bicycle Lanes in Urban Europe, 1900–1995,” Transfers 1, no. 2 (2011
The Transformation of Urban Mobility Practices in Maastricht (1950–1980)
Coevolution of Cycling and Car Mobility
Marc Dijk, Anique Hommels, and Manuel Stoffers
photographs, and our interviewees all suggest that the bicycle was used by many as a common way of moving around the city in the 1950s, the concerns and interests of cyclists were unaddressed in the local newspapers. Bicycle lanes or paths, for instance, were