E-micromobility, Cycling, and ‘Good’ Active Travel

Abstract

Our article explores the potential for e-micromobility (EMM) to produce ‘good’ active travel space together with cycling. To illuminate the technical, political and moral complexity of this challenge, we contend that EMM and cycling ought to be co-articulated as a unique and integrated production of space––a social and contested production that diffuses active mobility practices via planned infrastructures from the city through the suburbs to the countryside (and back again).     Everyday, embodied experiences and interactions grounded in material infrastructures bring the social production of active travel space to life. Our article foregrounds these experiences and the unique affordances of EMM––with a focus on electric unicycles (EUCs) and e-bikes––by drawing on auto-ethnographic, interview and cinematic data, before widening our purview to consider their broader planning and moral contexts related to mobility justice. The city of Vancouver and its surroundings serve as our principal case study alongside forays to other places. We take advantage of our expertise in EMM, cycling, and cinematic go-along methodology to present what the experience of riding alone and with others, for pleasure and for work, looks and feels like on contested public streets, shared pathways and not-just-for-bike lanes.     Our analysis shows that, like cycling, EMM carries benefits with respect to health, wellbeing, spatial literacy and community belonging. At the same time, EMM affords its own mobile sociality and kinaesthetic performance skills, which can expand and diversify active travel itself though longer distances and inclusion of more kinds of bodies and capabilities. However, also like cycling, EMM carries costs, including frictions and fears surrounding negative, often violent interactions with other road users. These include upwardly mobile men who police active travel lanes as “white lanes.” Most especially, they include motorists who, as a normalized part of the production of motor vehicle space, routinely punish and dehumanize vulnerable people doing active travel, and do not defer to their legal entitlement to public street space. Such frictions only magnify the imperative to produce EMM space not at the expense of space for cycling (or walking or public transit), but rather at the expense of space for the motor vehicle.             Without suggesting that all EMM space should also be cycling space, or vice versa––particularly in more dangerous, high speed spaces (>30 km/hr)––we highlight the vast potential to produce shared EMM-cycling infrastructures in the salient forms of 1) lanes/pathways protected from motorists, and 2) traffic-calmed neighbourhood greenways. Decades of cycling research show these infrastructures are vital for converting habitual motorists and the urban planners, engineers and property owners who enable them. We finish by broaching political and planning frictions and flows generated by the co-production of active travel by EMM and cycling, with a focus on active travel gentrification, gig-economy work and the creeping hi-tech urban financialization of active travel––for all of which, Vancouver presents a strong and critical case study.     Ultimately, we conclude that the ‘goodness’ of co-producing EMM together with cycling pivots on its capacity to bring the health, wealth, conviviality and ecological benefits of active travel to the people and places who need it most––on its ability to advance mobility justice.