Speaker
Description
In the recent years, the concept of “cycle highways” has been increasingly popular among French cycling activists and experts. First introduced in the 1970s in the Netherlands, cycle highways are a specific kind of cycling infrastructure designed to provide safe and fast cycling trips connecting residential areas to work and study places, especially in the outskirts of cities (Cabral Dias and Gomes Ribeiro, 2021). The first cycle highways plan in France was launched in the early 2010s in Strasbourg, but the aftermaths of the COVID-19 crisis and the pop-up bike lanes experiments led to the development of several plans in big French cities. Fast, safe, and “more inclusive” are terms widely used by the municipalities and cycling activists promoting these infrastructure schemes. But are cycle highways truly more inclusive? While several studies have pointed out that cycling policies contribute to the reproduction of inequalities through fundings or infrastructure provision (Psarikidou, 2020), does this new infrastructure contribute to the transformation towards more just cycling policies?
Building on an on-going research project on the diffusion and implementation of cycle highways infrastructure projects, this contribution will focus on the actors involved in the conceptualization, standardization, design and implementation of cycle highways, and their imaginaries and frames of reference (Jobert and Muller, 1987) that guide the conception of these projects. By focusing on three Metropolitan areas – Montpellier, Paris Region and Lyon – we explore how the increasing technicality and standardization of cycling policies might tend to reduce the notion of inclusiveness to specific age and gender issues, downplaying other important questions of spatial and social accessibility to cycling. These three cases will allow the reflection on the blind spots of cycling infrastructure policies, and their contribution to just and sustainable mobility futures.
References:
Cabral Dias, G. J. and Gomes Ribeiro, P. J. (2021) ‘Cycle Highways: a new concept of infrastructure’, European Planning Studies, 29(6), pp. 1003–1020.
Jobert, B. and Muller, P. (1987) L’Etat en action, Paris, PUF.
Psarikidou, K. (2020). Em-‘powering’ niche innovations: learning from cycling inequalities. Applied Mobilities, 5(3), 271–288.
Biography
Manon Eskenazi is a researcher in urban planning at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, France. Her current research focuses on policy transfers in cycling infrastructure policies in Europe. She is interested in mobility transitions, materialities and international comparison.
