 Hello everyone and welcome to Cycling Research Review. This is the fourth episode and in today's episode we'll be covering a paper by Till Koglen and Tom Rye on the marginalization of bicycling in modernist transport planning. So I'm going to start off with a quote by John Maynard Keynes who is very dear to me in my heart because I started off studying economics and he writes, practical men who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economists. He wrote this in 1936 and I think for this you can also apply this to urban planners and also traffic engineers and the idea is that what we think is so practical such as putting down asphalt in our cities or laying down bricks or designing curves or putting down bike paths is usually behind the scenes informed by some form of ideology right? So why is it that some countries have less bike paths than others? Why is it that we have different design standards? They seem like very practical questions that consultants and governments ask but if you dig really deep you look into the history right and history and also you look into the ideology about how people choose to live their lives and also very many cultural aspects. So I think just talking about design alone only scratches the surface at a very low level and to really understand why we're doing what we're doing we have to dig deeper into theories and the work the academics have done to really try to conceptualize how to look at urban planning, how to look at the frameworks of transport and how history has shaped the profession and disciplines as they are today. So I got my trusty iPad and how I write this is first I write the blog post and then I kind of riff off it in a bit. So the first question I ask is why is urban planning theory important and what uses it to a work for a frustrated consultant who is struggling with the impossible task of fitting like let's say a fire truck down a small alleyway right? How do we really get to this point and part of the question is also why do we have such big of fire trucks right? Why are our cities designed around automobiles and less so around pedestrians and bicycles? It wasn't always in this way at some point it happened. If you look back in pictures of many cities before the car in the 1900s this certainly wasn't the case. So there's a physical shift but accompanying it is also a ideological shift and today we're going to try and talk a bit more about the ideological shift which is a focus of this paper. So a quote from Copeland and Rye, with modernism coming into focus on motorized traffic and it was a general trend that the street should be eliminated and replaced by roads. Streets were seen as old-fashioned places where urban life devolved around people, meeting each other and where different modes of transport mixed. Roads on the other hand were seen as modern arteries of cities where motorized traffic should be able to flow fast and without interruptions caused by other modes of transport. Other places where this has been written quite substantially about is Peter Norton's book Fighting Traffic among others. So transport historians have really realized that this is a problem and today's modern movement of let's say shared space in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. This idea of bringing people and other modes of transport back onto the street and treating cars as guests. This is really revisiting an idea that happened at the turn of the century, well the last century, the 20th century before cars were really a part of the street scene. So we're trying to turn the dial back but in a context where automobiles are a lot more popular. So what really underlies our approach to bicycle planning these days? I think it is and Koglen and Raya argues in this article that what underpins today's ideology is still automotive-based thinking. Why is it that traffic belongs in a traffic engineering department at most universities? Why is urban planning based on models, based on mechanistic models that is also integrated into travel behavior modeling, right? So why is it that we focus on A to B and how people move in between and the four-step model of traffic modeling? We're moving away from it the four-step model but the underlying argument is the same that it's still a very mechanistic and quantitative approach. So Koglen and Raya then argues the development of key aspects of transport planning as a science has led to focus on modeling and other rational methods for planning. We examine how if something similar could be applied for planning for cycling. It could raise the acceptability and the status of cycling among key stakeholders and politicians. At the same time the rationality within transport planning as a profession and as a science is criticized and a different theory for bicycle planning is proposed, right? So we could make bicycle planning more like the methods that have been deployed for motorized vehicle planning or the question is if we were to develop a curriculum, if we were to introduce a new generation of traffic planners into the university system or into an education system, is the approach that we teach them engineering or is the approach that we teach some more of urban design, psychology and other aspects of how Jane J. Cove's Kevin Lynch and William White approached the study of the city. So do we want our next generation of people who are managing traffic to come from a mechanistic quantitative background or do we want that generation to have certain other types of lenses of looking at the world? Because the lens through which you look at the world then creates an ideology through which as an urban planner then you plan and make that world concrete. So it's an interesting question and something I've been thinking quite extensively about is if we want the world to be different what kind of ideologies should and ways of looking at the world should replace the current one. And many times the default ideology is the ideology that is completely invisible, right? So the many of us have a hard time imagining streets other than in the form that they are today. Cove and Rye then goes on to talk about how this more social aspect of space can replace the current mechanistic view of streets and they say, quote, even though space is produced through social relations, planning urban spaces specifically designed for motor traffic gives more power to car drivers. So now the issue of power comes in. In the end it is about the right to public spaces and cities and about who has access to these spaces and who is excluded. When people who do not want to bicycle feel that they cannot do so because of poor condition this leads to a greater question of whether public space is truly open and usable places to which everyone has equal access. So in the early days of transport planning as a field resources were primarily focused on building roads and investing in infrastructure for cars and railway traffic. It is only significantly later. I think we're still doing that, but okay. It's only until significantly later that infrastructure project for cycling and pedestrians also received significant funding. So there is a history to this. There is a history of the practical elements of how the automobile and the automobile industry lobbied cities to create more space for people to use their automobiles and that comes from a very practical point is if you're going to produce cars and people are going to use cars then you need space for those cars to operate. But I'm afraid that this very practical point which started out as marketing and as creating a new system for urban mobility has now turned into an ideology. And right now I'm going to go back to John Maynard Keynes who said sooner or later it is ideas not vested interests which are dangerous for good and evil. For the past 50 years our idea of planning has been modernism. Now there's shifts that are happening or there's things like new urbanism. There's knowing that we should move away from suburbs, compact cities, sustainable cities. So we are moving away from that view but the ideology remains firmly entrenched. And then Koglen Rai then offers us some points and agendas to move forward. So modernism is perhaps not working in this new paradigm that we work in and as we move forward perhaps cities need something other than efficiency to create better quality of living for citizens. So what can accommodate this shift and as intellectuals and as academics what are other lenses through which we can view the city? So Koglen Rai then bases their recommendations on Cresswell's work who he works in the field of mobility studies which started I think in the 2000s and that whole field tries to look at the world if I were to sum it up as more than A to B. So taking sociology and traditional stationary disciplines and making it go on the move right. So for example for my research when I interview cyclists we do it together on a bicycle on the road and Justin Spinney and others have really pioneered this method of taking the interview and doing it in situ so in situations where it's happening. So by doing so by applying these methods of studying mobility as they happen from a sociological perspective from a variety of disciplines then we can better understand well we go from A to B but what happens in between? Can that also be something that contributes to the quality of life of people? Is there some is that a big hole that we're missing in academic studies? So I'll quote them again and that I'll finish off this video is that they argue the research on mobility and villa mobility offers theories of the culture performance problems etc with transport and mobility and this research often has an urban perspective. However the power relations in transport planning and how these impact on theories of bicycle planning itself are not the central focus in this kind of research. Villa mobility research focuses on more social aspects of cycling and on aspects of identity for example rather than on one more concrete bicycle planning issues the politics of mobility or in this case the politics of villa mobility could then be modified in the following way in which to develop a theoretical approach for bicycle planning and he lives four points. Point number one physical movement from A to B infrastructure for bicycling without obstacles and the creation of free and safe flow for cyclists. Number two power relations in urban traffic space this means the consideration of power relations between urban groups different groups that share the urban traffic space and creating spaces where cycling is not marginalized. Number three positive representations of cycling this means a representation that is adapted and targeted to different groups of people and that creates a shared meaning of cycling that goes beyond class gender ethnic and other boundaries. Number four finally the everyday practice and experience of cycling. Cycling should make the everyday and social lives of people easier right that's why we do transport it's to make people's lives easier it's to connect with other people. Thus the infrastructure and bicycle planning must involve aspects of everyday life in order to make the cycling experience more pleasant right so we're dealing with people not atoms where when we take traffic models from let's say models of laminar flow and physics and how water moves through the tube and we apply it to how cars move through a highway we're really forgetting the social aspect and we see it most right we forget we forget about it when people are in metal boxes zooming down the road but when we look at urban public space in particular that all has to come back in because the purpose of transport planning is indeed part of it to get people from A to B but if we look on a bigger level why do people have to go from A to B so they can do stuff they can socialize they can get to work they can they can meet other people so we're trying to enable through transportation an urban system that works and we should think of cycling as a piece of that system to make it work so that's it for today I encourage you to check out the links below to the original paper orange for the original published version and then green of course for open access now I do the quotations as part of the page numbers on the quotations from the official published version so they'll defer a bit from the open access version but if you control f and search them up they should bring you to the right point so a few notes about this video series one I got a better camera and microphone so I got some comments from you guys about how to make this better and one of those comments is that I should keep a consistent speaking pace so I hope this this works out better and another comment was also to make slides and graphics in the the video so that's all coming but for now I just kind of want to get these things out there so I thank you for your feedback and I am keeping these in mind as I work to improve but I hopefully this video quality is much better than the previous and and today is a astoundingly warm day so I got my short sleeves on 31 degrees in Tilburg all right have a good week and I will see everyone next Tuesday