 Hello everyone and welcome to Spokes, the Urban Cycling Institute podcast. Today here I have with me Justin Spinney from Cardiff University. Hello. Hello. And we are here at the Cycling Research Board second annual conference in the city of Delft. So happy to have you with us, Justin. Very happy to be here, George. Thank you. Cool. So tell us a bit about what you're presenting today. Okay, so presentation today, well actually tomorrow, is going to be on some work that my colleague, our Wenny Lin, at National Taipei University have been doing on public bike share in Shanghai, which has really led us to looking. We've been looking at Doppler's public bike share there and it's really kind of led us to looking at data of all things. When we started the project it wasn't what we thought we'd be looking at, but we've been looking at how as a form of surveillance capitalism effectively the likes of mobile and OFO are taking our data, our behavioural surplus as Zuboff calls it and turning that into predictive products, whether that be transport models or selling to advertisers or finance companies, because it tells them something extra about us and our habits, likes, dislikes and those kind of things. So it's really kind of an investigative exploratory piece of research, just looking at how the humble bicycles of vehicles become a vehicle for harvesting of our data effectively. So time cycling into these other kind of economies, things like the data economy. So yeah, that's it. Wow. And so in this research, who's doing the selling and who's doing the buying and what's problematic about the current situation? This is the thing and you know, it's partly a descriptive piece of research in some ways. So I'm just trying not to crash. It's probably a descriptive piece of research in the sense of we're just, we're not saying this necessarily will come to pass. It may be that the likes of mobile and OFO and these other companies won't be to monetize their data. And so one of the scenarios is that they just go under. They can't make money out of the business model as it were. But you know, we're more interested in the sort of governance implications of it. The fact is that maybe it was before, make a right, perhaps before it was the municipality who owned that transport data and could make that model of cyclist behavior, whereas now that's now owned by a private company. And so they'll be selling that to the city. So partly it's about rights to ownership and governance of data, but also in terms of us as citizens, you know, we hire that bike, we get a service, but there's no real transparency about what data is being collected on us, who it's going to, how it's going to be used as it were. So we're just kind of trying to ask those kind of questions really. Here we're coming up to a construction site. So they still take care of the bikes generally when they do construction. And then we'll take a bit of a route back into the city center, give our viewers a nice look at the historic center of Delft Hill. So we'll make a right up here. And I want to also talk to you about your paper in 2011, Meaning Methods, where you write about video ethnography, and you really pioneered it back in the days when you had to use a handy cam, right? And you had to really rig up something very specific. And that was before the era of GoPro. So how, how complicated were that piece of research? Well, firstly hats off to you, George, you kind of taken it forward and you're having seen you set this up, you're the total pro. So yeah, I feel like a bit of a dinosaur now when we actually think about it in the days before the GoPro definitely says something. But yeah, you know, it's funny because like so much research, it's kind of contingent. It never seemed in any way innovative. And, you know, like a lot of things wasn't necessarily completely thought through. I just, I had this mission, this idea that I wanted to try and get to the experience of cycling. And so I was just trying different ways of kind of doing this and seeing what each method gave me and what it didn't. And what, you know, I tried cycling around London, talking to cyclists and that turned out that that was probably not going to end well. So we kind of ditched that. And I mean, it says something as a method, you know, the brokenness of that. And the kind of fraughtness of it says something about cycling in London at the time as a method. But yeah, we ended up on this, this idea, okay, we'll film the journey and then we'll play that journey back and we'll be able to, you know, talk about that in a kind of, in a safer interview context and what that might, what that kind of might, you know, offer us. Right. Because what we're doing right here would not be at all possible in London. We'd get honked at, you'd probably be passing really close to buses and stuff. I'm new to this town. This is kind of day two in this town. But already I feel like I can do this on a bike that I'm quite familiar with. It's got no proper brakes, you know, but I'm not fearing for my life and I can talk. I've got enough bandwidth in my head to kind of think a bit on my feet and talk to you. So yeah, it is a completely, completely different thing that as you say, could we just go into London and do this even now? I don't think so. You know, London's a different place from what it was 15 years ago in some ways when I was doing my PhD research there, but I'm pretty sure we can do this. You mentioned the idea of bandwidth and Marco Tobromastut and a group of people at the Urban Cycling Institute, we've been thinking about this idea of flow and how, you know, if we have a certain degree of mental workload, it actually helps us think. So it's like the zone where, you know, you're exerting physical energy, your paying attention to your surrounding, but it leads to a better conversation because there's more going on in your head rather than if we're just sitting down and talking to each other. What do you think about that? Well, we've had some nice presentations, I think, at the CRB talking about that and, you know, the ideas of sensory overload and our spatial awareness and things like that. So, you know, I think there is definitely a lot to be said for it. I think one of the things we have to be careful of, and it's easy to fall into a trap of when we're using things like video or doing anything, in fact, that we end up focusing on the key events, those things that really stand out to people and they really kind of remember. But actually, things are sort of uneventful or worth focusing on as well. And actually, I think video can be useful for that because, you know, there may be big sections where maybe there's not that much happening. But that's meaningful in itself, right? If you can drift off as it were, what does that say about your experience and how you're experiencing safety and your environment and all these different things? So, yeah, I think video, you know, and again, it becomes about your focus. If you become too focused on events as it were, then same with any method. But video, perhaps, video might lead us down that path a bit more if we're not careful because of the sort of visuality of the event, you know. Yeah, and when I do my interviews with my participants from the ride-along research, I always ask them like, come on, one to ten, how is the infrastructure? One to ten, how is the environment? We'll make it right across the bridge. Okay, cool. And just as some way to compare one segment or one moment of fleeting experience to the next, but it's not always fruitful. Even trying to left, trying to put this experience in terms of a momentary number, even when I give the instruction of like, let's say, for example, past 400 meters on a scale of one to ten, how was the infrastructure? Right, yes, yeah. I mean, and that, you know, I think that, you know, we've passed through so much in the last 400 meters that I couldn't tell you, you know, what it was, it certainly wasn't particularly fraught. It was probably a bit more fraught because I'm trying to think about what I'm saying as well, you know, in a way that we wouldn't normally. But yeah, I just think that's the problem with some of those kind of audit tools that you have out there. But it says, you know, what was the last 400 meters like? And actually, it was so varied that you couldn't really say anything. Perhaps the video announced us to remember that a bit more and sort of break that down. When you did your ethnographic study in the UK, you did the interviews afterwards, right? And there was no, did you record the ride at all? What was the relationship between the during the ride and after the ride? Yeah, so I mean, with each participant, I kind of first started by, you know, just getting a bit of familiarity, establishing a report, just talking about them in a kind of cycling biography in a way. And then with the actual... How long did that take, the establishing report? Yeah, so that was usually just kind of a couple of hours, you know, very leisurely. Oh, I didn't have that though. I just went like, boom, right in. Yeah, well, perhaps that was more important in some ways in the London context because there are more cyclists than there are people that just use bikes as it were. So, you know, it was more of an identity that had been consciously taken on. So it was looking at where, you know, how cyclists, being a cyclist, they come to feature in their lives in some ways. So maybe that's why that was a bit more important, I think. Yeah, and then the rides themselves, I tried to film three rides with each participant. That is in-depth. Yeah, well, at the end of the time, this is a note for everyone doing a PhD. Yeah, I certainly am that paranoia that there's never enough data. I must gather more data. So I ended up with, I think, you know, 20 participants trying to do three rides with each one, as well as all those interviews with the planners and the engineers and the activists, you know. So I ended up with way too much, I think. Yeah, and I think that's interesting. Before you set out, my supervisor actually sat down and was like, OK, wait, but if we do the calculations, you said you're going to do 20 at three rides per person. You do the math and then you do the math on the transcription and you can really get yourself into a hole. Oh, I mean, the transcription was a hole, for sure. You know, that was towards the end of that. That couldn't end soon enough, really. But again, you know, that's always a valuable exercise, the transcription. It goes straight here. All right, yeah. This conference here, this year is in Delft, second annual conference. How is this experience different from last year in Amsterdam, especially in relation to the physical location that we're in? I mean, so I have been to Delft before. It was about 10 or so years ago. But I couldn't really remember any of it. I just remembered it was nice. Compared to Amsterdam, the physical situation, I think it's a calmer version of Amsterdam. You know, it's smaller, it's calmer. It's still got its bike rush hour and I still think you have to... What time is it? Is it rush hour? No, it is now 3.40, so no, we're not in rush hour right now. Maybe into the semi rush hour. But Amsterdam when I was there last year, that was my first time there. And that felt like you kind of had to have a decent level of local knowledge, what was kind of expected of you as a cyclist. Just because there was so many people, the kind of margin for error was that much less. If you can start acting like a tourist, whereas here it feels a little more... I can make a few mistakes and there's more margin for error. I can probably get away with that. I've already crashed into a few things already. Slowly, obviously. Me not so slowly. I want to talk about the future of cycling research. Because we just had a session where we really talked about whether this idea of cycling research is overproduced. But then we got the calendar argument that, well, automobile research is really where it's overproduced and where the capital and the budget is being spent on. I don't know if you have a take on how we should proceed as academics in the field of cycling. No, I mean there is no one take there. I think everyone has their own interests that they're pursuing. I think Samuel was right when he hit on that idea of institutions and maybe we know a lot of what we need to do. It's a lot of what we need to ask is why can't we implement it? Why can't we make it happen in these contexts? We know some of the answers there, but a lot of that is so context specific. The politics of it. How do we activate citizens? How do we promote cycling and smooth the path to creating cycling subjects whilst at the same time slowly but carefully making that driving subject because you make dramatic shifts there and people get crossed. And rightly so because they're just trying to go about their social lives. We all are. That becomes dramatically harder overnight and people get crossed and that incremental nature of it is hard. People forget that in the kind of Dutch context, you want to change your city to look like Delft in five years. No, Delft has taken a good 50 years and then some. So we have to realise the incremental nature of that and create these roadmaps. So I think the political and the institutional is key there. Perhaps getting beyond some of this slightly more simplistic policy learning and policy transfer. Let's go way back in your life to when you got interested in the topic of cycling. You yourself raced or did an ethnographic study of road cyclists? I did a bit around then because I think I was like a lot of people interested in cycling when I was younger, dropped it in my teenage years, got a motorbike, picked it back up again a bit later on. And so I was very keen and started doing a bit of racing and stuff when I was 25. And actually when I went to do a PhD, it wasn't until I was about 30, that I had no intention of researching cycling, my PhD. I did it for my masters because I thought, well, hell, I'll just do what I enjoy. And I was doing a lot of cycling. So the Model 1.2 paper came out of that. But then after it, I wanted to focus on, I think it was the political economy of news media. But my supervisor, I think quite wisely, said, why don't you do cycling? Stick to what you know. I think he was right. I think he made a good call. Thanks, Phil. And so that's how I come to be in the place that I am now. I'm quite glad about it. As you probably know, George is a privileged position to be in. It is a very privileged position to be in. Writing and researching about the thing that you like, it doesn't get much better. Wow. Do you think this cycling policy is going to get changed at all with the Brexit? No, there's too many things up in the air when you mention the B-word. So I don't know. The most optimistic version of myself says that the country could go in a really positive direction. But at the same time, I'm not sure that's going to happen. Yeah, I honestly, it's too hard to say what's going to happen with transport policy. My feeling is that we will just carry on doing much of the same. And a lot of the positive influence from Europe will dry up in the sense that some of those formal links will disappear. Some of the things that have made collaboration with Europe easier, may dry up. It's not that we don't want to collaborate. And I think when most of us will still try and collaborate with our European and international partners. But it will just be that much harder to some extent. So hopefully things aren't going to drastically change overnight, you know, I hope. But yeah, it's just another little barrier possibly in our way in terms of collaboration. There's not so much to learn from our European partners. And also, you know, we've had a few successes ourselves as well. Yeah, there was a study that I read two weeks ago. I realized that Great Britain isn't all that far behind the US in terms of obesity, especially childhood obesity is actually way up there. But then I looked at the urban form of most UK cities. They're quite historic. They got narrow roads. And it really puzzles me how a place that has such a different urban form than the US can then at the same time have such low rates of active transportation. Yeah, you know, you might think, you know, you look at those narrow streets in Delft and you think, oh, automatically, OK, cars are going to go slowly and people are more likely to walk and cycle. Then you look, you know, yeah, as you say, your average UK town. And, lo and behold, narrow streets but higher speed limits and more cars, less walking and cycling. So how does this, yeah, how is this kind of played out? We have priority here. So we just keep going. We'll go left. Oh, we're getting into rush hour. So this is the main route from the university basically to the train station. And we'll get to kind of high school. Start getting a bit busy. Any words for beginning researchers, people doing their PhDs or even the late stages of their masters? Hopefully you're already doing what you enjoy and what interests you. Stick with that. I think with the cycling research in particular, try and stay engaged with central and local government policy. Even though that might be easier said than done. Yeah. Try and try and get in there. Maintain your voice in those kind of circles. It's something I'm still working on and it's quite sporadic. I think you're much better at that kind of stuff, George. You know, I'm going to take a masterclass from you. Well, Jess, I think we'll end it here on this beautiful riverfront of Delft. Thank you so much for joining me today. We're going to try this handshake while riding. So cheers, Justin. Yeah, cheers, George. I'll see you next time, eh? Yeah, take care. Bye.