Contextual

Transport cycling in all its variant forms – from the personal to the political – challenges the socio-technical system of automobility (Urry, 2004). In a resistance to automobility, vélomobility studies, such as Koglin (2014) and Cox (2019), are slowly emerging under the new mobilities model (Sheller and Urry, 2006). At the heart of these studies is the careful investigation of current imbalances and impasses for sustainable transport and inclusive societies. The work presented in this chapter forms part of the author's PhD project: an ethnographic investigation into women activists campaigning for cycleways in Bremen and Newcastle (Leyendecker, forthcoming), funded by Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. Through reflexive autoethnography, study of cycling infrastructures is revealed as not simply a concern for dissociated observation but of everyday personal experience. Thus this chapter is written in the first person to highlight that not only is the personal political, but when analysing everyday experiences conveyed by urban space, infrastructural interventions and the decision-making process that create them, the political is also personal. While this chapter focuses specifically on the policy documentation, its impacts are experienced as affect. This chapter seeks to advance assertions from previous chapters, namely that there is a moral political dimension to infrastructure as a socio-technical assemblage (Cox, Chapter 1, this volume), that a modernist approach to transport planning hinders its development (Koglin, Chapter 3, this volume) and that the interpretation of policies results in a value-action gap for cycling (Whitelegg, Chapter 5, this volume).

My experience of the UK in comparison to other European contexts confirms the findings that cycling as a personal and social practice in the UK remains too readily stigmatised (Horton, 2007; Aldred, 2010) as well as marginalised in transport spaces (Koglin and Rye, 2014). To allow transport governance to progress beyond its current focus on changing individual behaviour (Spotswood, 2016) would involve democratising the transport agenda: we must acknowledge the strong influence that urban design exerts on our transport choices. As both Pucher and Buehler (2012) and Pooley et al (2013) have expressly pointed out: cycleways protected from motor traffic, along main roads in particular, fulfil a basic material need for citizens who wish to cycle their everyday journeys. In sum, the demands made by transport cycling are inherently about re-designing our urbanbuilt environments for societal inclusion, spatial and environmental justice.