Jennifer Bonham

Bicycling and the Life Course: The Start-Stop-Start Experiences of Women Cycling

ABSTRACT Interest in cycling as a sustainable form of transport has helped foreground questions of gender and mobility. This paper reports on a qualitative study into Australian womens experiences of cycling through the life course. It focuses on the circumstances in which women start and stop cycling and the spatial contexts in which this occurs. The study found that, after childhood, almost half of the respondents had returned to cycling several times through the life course. Changes in womens cycling patterns related to changes in housing, employment, health and family status. The findings suggest productive new way of researching everyday mobility.

Transport: Disciplining the Body That Travels

In this article, the author considers the proliferation of automobile usage within a broader study of how urban populations have been encouraged to think about and conduct their journeys. The author examines the proliferation of automobile usage in the Australian city of Adelaide, locating the motor car within a broader historical investigation of the objectification of the spaces, bodies, and conduct of urban travel. The author focuses on the period through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when efficient movement was popularized as the principle by which to guide the arrangement of street space and the ordering of urban traffic. The author concludes that the logic of the economic journal provided the basis for designating street space for a new order of mobility. The second part of the article focuses on the objectification of the traveling body and the human capacities necessary to undertake fast, orderly movement.

Rethinking oil depletion: what role can cycling really play in dispersed cities?

Abstract What is the role of cycling in dispersed cities under Peak Oil? This research sought to appraise the bicycles mitigating potential in an oil crisis, and to identify the specific ways planners may respond to maximise these effects. An overview of cycling in dispersed cities, focused on US and Australian cities, highlights low bicycle mode shares and low participation rates for women, children and seniors at present. Yet cycling can flourish in suburban settings, with low-density, outer-suburban communities in many European cities having very high bicycle mode shares, and strong participation across all demographic groups. Under a variety of Peak Oil scenarios, the bicycle is shown to play specific roles in supplying local mobility and access to and from mass public transport for longer distance trips. In conjunction with minor urban restructuring and public transport networking, many suburban areas could still function without reliance on large quantities of oil for access and mobility. Planning priorities include cycle network planning, ensuring current infrastructures can meet demand, links to public transport and end-of-trip facilities, and socio-cultural research into suburban bicycle sub-markets to better inform targeted behaviour change interventions.

Chapter 3 Women Cycling Through the Life Course: An Australian Case Study

Purpose – The research reported in this chapter focuses on understanding the experiences of women who had decided to return to cycling in adulthood. It was anticipated these experiences could assist other women contemplating taking up cycling as well as cycling lobbyists, policy makers and planners. Methodology – The research targeted women returning to cycling in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. It was conducted using qualitative research methods including in-depth interviews, helmet-mounted video cameras and diary entries. Forty-nine women participated in the study ranging in age from early 20s to mid-70s. Findings – Respondents learned to cycle between the ages of 5 and 12 and most stopped in the early years of secondary school. Almost half the respondents had returned to cycling several times through the life course while another significant group had cycled occasionally up to the time of the interview. Women returned to cycling through a combination of circumstances but women in their early 20s emphasised the importance of social relationships while women in their late 30s (and older) stressed concerns about health and fitness. Becoming mothers or grandmothers was given as a reason for both taking up and giving up cycling. Although there was no pattern in the specific trigger that shifted women from ‘thinking about cycling to getting on a bike’, knowing someone who cycled – partner, family member, work colleague or acquaintance – featured in most womens experiences. Research implications – The findings suggest further research into mobility through the life course will be productive.

Travel blending: Whither regulation?

Travel blending, as a form of travel demand management, has in recent times been celebrated by transport planners as a means of shaping travel behaviour without regulation. Accordingly, travel blending is said to overcome the problems of the state bureaucracy imposing its will upon the individual’s travel choices. In this paper we introduce a Foucauldian analysis to the field of transport in order to examine the assertions made by proponents of travel blending that they are not exercising power in the course of shaping travel behaviour. In particular, we use recent elaborations of Foucault’s work on governmentality to explore the ways in which the sites, subjects and objects of travel are discursively constituted within travel blending thereby enabling new ways of intervening upon the travelling subject. We suggest that a governmentality approach not only provides a fertile means of investigating transport but also reveals travel blending as a regulatory practice serving to structure the individual’s field of action.

Cycling ‘subjects’ in ongoing-formation: The politics of interviews and interview analysis

This article offers a poststructuralist analytic strategy that highlights the political nature of interview analysis. Interviews pose a particular challenge for poststructuralist researchers given a widespread view that they are a method for accessing the ‘truth’. We develop a strategy that bypasses this difficulty by analysing precisely ‘what is said’ in interviews. In our analysis, discourse refers to knowledge, not language. With this understanding, we argue that focusing on exactly ‘what is said’ provides an entry point into the knowledges that make it possible for something to be said and into the eruption of new possibilities. This focus displaces assumptions about an ‘interior’ self who constructs versions of the world, with a concern for the strategic relations – the politics – within which objects and subject positions are produced. The paper draws on interviews conducted during a study into women cycling to demonstrate our poststructuralist analytic strategy.