The cycling situation today

Transport systems dominated by motorised traffic experience severe problems in congestion, pollution, social exclusion and health issues (Banister, 2005; Nuhn and Hesse, 2006; van Wee, 2007), in addition to being a major contributor to climate change. As an active mode of transport, cycling offers a range of benefits: it contributes to the health of its users, is an inexpensive way to travel, it takes up less space than motorised traffic and it does not contribute to CO2 or other emissions (Garrard et al, 2012; Fishman, 2016; Gotschi et al, 2016). Thus many cities are working on improvements for cycling conditions (Pucher and Buehler, 2008; Garrard et al, 2012; Handy et al, 2014; Lanzendorf and Busch-Geertsema, 2014; Fishman, 2016; Pojani et al, 2017).

Due to its positive effects, cycling is currently positively promoted across Europe as a contributor to a number of policy agendas. Cycle use as transport is seen to contribute to ease congestion, contribute to carbon reduction, improve urban air quality, and further benefits in individual health, economic efficiency and liveable cities are linked to its promotion (see Grafl et al, 2019). Research has repeatedly shown the positive effects of cycling, however, there are still many cities, like Stockholm in Sweden for example, that have failed to increase cycling as a percentage of trips (Koglin, 2015a). Other cities struggle to maintain high levels of cycling, or they observe decreases in cycling levels (Copenhagen, for example see te Brommelstroet et al, forthcoming). The reality of current schemes building cyclefriendly cities is frequently framed around the provision of specific hard infrastructure.

In addition to the proliferation of policy studies, academic texts on cycling research are also expanding rapidly (Pucher and Buehler, 2017). A dominant theme among these is the use of infrastructure measures (hard and soft) to assist the promotion of cycling as part of a movement towards sustainable mobility systems (Beland, 2014; Mrkajić and Anguelovski, 2016). As part of these academic reflections on cycling practices and policies, there have been cycling-specific academic conferences and a considerable number of specialist panels on cycling in other network conferences, in fields such as mobilities studies, transport history and transport studies.