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
From Victim to Villain
Cycling, Traffic Policy, and Spatial Conflicts in Stockholm, circa 1980
Martin Emanuel
traffic department recruited the bicycle-minded engineer Sven Ekman to elaborate a bicycle plan for Stockholm. His proposal was included in the city's 1975 overall traffic plan and survived the revision of the plan under the new conservative majority that
The Transformation of Urban Mobility Practices in Maastricht (1950–1980)
Coevolution of Cycling and Car Mobility
Marc Dijk, Anique Hommels, and Manuel Stoffers
their knowledge and experience in urban traffic planning. The parking capacity of garages became an important factor in the “parking balance” of the city, and entrances and exits of garages were attuned to the (often one-way) use of streets. Furthermore