Hot Take - Cycling research is in fact pro car!

Katja Kircherake

Excerpted from a presentation by Katja Kircher, of VTI, the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, on 14 June 2026, part of Climate Talks for Everyone. View the complete recording HERE.

PART TWO

Is the claim that cycling research in fact is pro-car an unfounded hot take, or is there some truth to it? ​

Bike lanes are bad

​We do a lot of research on how to build bike lanes, and it seems rather uncontroversial to demand more bike lanes, especially physically separated ones.​

But if we build bike lanes, we cement the existence of “car streets” at the same time. ​

And let’s face it, in many places, bike lanes are mostly built to sweep the streets free of bikes, so that cars can travel unimpeded.​ And similarly, what does the odd “bicycle street” here and there tell us – is the default the “car street” then?

A cyclist rides on a red-painted street giving bicycles the right of way over cars. PHOTO: John S. Allen Bicycle Blog

Cars ruin not only cities

Almost all cycling research focuses on urban areas. But by only focusing on “reducing” traffic in urban areas, we implicitly concede that rural roads belong to cars, and thereby we accept that cars continue to play a strong role in and around urban areas.​ Inevitably, people living in rural areas will want to drive to town, and even more so if public transport doesn’t deliver, and if towns accommodate this motor traffic influx. This generates car traffic everywhere, in rural and in urban areas.​

Sticks not carrots

And what are we [cyclist researchers] proud of developing for cyclists?​

• A handrail to hold on to while waiting at a traffic light (which would actually not even be needed without cars).​

• A reduction in red light waiting time for cyclists when it rains.​

• A bike-to-work scheme with brownie points.​

  
  

We study whether little incentives make cycling attractive to people, instead of working on how to impede and remove private cars via policies and laws. ​As long as we don’t touch the big red carpet that is permanently rolled out for cars, there will be no substantial change.​

And by the way, limiting motordom is not even a "stick" - it's only a removal of privileges that should not have been there to begin with. ​

Watch our language

We speak (and believe) the language introduced by the car lobby. ​“Saving lives” is a big topic.

• We call cyclists and pedestrians “vulnerable road users” – is the default road user the armoured one?​

• We want to advance “micromobility” – is the default mobility size a car? ​

• We say that “cycling is dangerous,” and that we shouldn’t cycle on “dangerous roads” – when the danger doesn’t emanate from cycling, and typically not from the road. The motor vehicles are what’s dangerous, due to their enormous kinetic energy.​

One major research area within cycling is “safety,” which generally means exploring how to inconvenience cyclists in some way or another to lessen the impact that cars have on them, instead of removing the source of the danger.​ We get entangled in endless arguments whether to say “a cyclist got hit by a car” or “a driver hit a cyclist” – when in reality this distinction doesn’t even matter. The fact that cyclists get hit by cars on a regular basis is the result of a system that allows heavy cars to pass around cyclists at speeds that are potentially lethal.

​By using this car-biased language, we are always looking into cycling in relation to cars instead of investigating how to optimise cycling in its own right. ​

Or, to be fair, we may not even care so much about cycling in itself, but rather focus on an accessible, equal, tranquil and welcoming world to live in. And then see what role cycling will play.​

“Ordinary harm”

I’d like to briefly come back to “ordinary harm” and “slow violence” as explanations for why we are so blind to the incredible damage done by motor vehicles, and how it can be possible that we do not protest more against such a deadly, ruinous system.​

“Ordinary harm” – it’s ordinary acts that are widely and regularly performed by many individuals. They are part of people's daily routines, and they are not only generally viewed as acceptable but maybe even as desirable. Driving a car is such an example.​

It is widely assumed that driving in itself is not a problem. If only people “drive safely,” if we only invest a bit more in driver monitoring, automated driving, and maybe even “passive protection” for the “vulnerable road users,” there is no problem.​

But – what if there is no safe driving? What if all driving is dangerous, with a varying degree of risk to kill in the actual situation. At some point, in some place, the next person will get hit and lose their life, a pedestrian or cyclist who did not choose to be surrounded by motor vehicles.​

But not only that – all driving produces noise and particles, from the exhaust pipe or the tyres and the road surface, particles that we breathe in. Air pollution from motor transport kills about ten times as many people as the direct carnage on the roads.​

Additionally, private cars reinforce social injustice, and cars gobble up space. We then focus on discussing whether mixed bike and pedestrian paths are a problem, and we complain that cyclists ride on the pavement. We don't even see all the [automobile lane] space that would solve those problems without pitching people walking and cycling against each other.​

But in cycling research, for the most part, driving is not described as the harm it is. Rather, it is almost treated as a natural phenomenon or not treated at all. It’s just there. It’s immutable. So we, the cycling researchers, adjust and adapt, we investigate when children are “traffic mature,” but all this keeps driving as the norm and everything else the exception.​

“Slow violence”

​To cite Rob Nixon, who coined the term "slow violence" in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor: Slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” I would say that slow violence is related to ordinary harm in that large parts of the population practice it, and also in that both are related to social inequality. ​

Again, looking at cycling research, we continue talking about “traffic safety” and turn a blind eye to “road violence.” ​We hardly mention how cars are built bigger, heavier and higher, we just continue testing our helmets and hope for the best. ​We don’t talk about how SUVs climb over guardrails as if they didn’t exist and instead celebrate our “protected” bike lanes.​ And we count how many people ride on that beautiful, protected bike lane next to the busy road, and we are happy as the health benefits of doing that aren’t outweighed by the particles the cyclists inevitably breathe in.​

“Traffication”

The injustice runs much deeper when we look beyond effects on humans. In the book Traffication, Paul Donald describes how profoundly traffic in the form of vehicles, but also the infrastructure serving them, affects plants and animals. ​They are not only killed by the millions, but they also have their living environments cut up, which affects their gene pool, and they are forced to adapt and change their behavioural patterns to be able to survive.​

And they do not benefit a bit from any of this.​

Attack, don’t defend

We, the dedicated cycling researchers, talk about the benefits of cycling for the environment, climate, biodiversity, health, inclusion, equity, you name it. All the time.​ We try to show with so many arguments that bikes are good for people. We work so hard to give them meaning.​

Cars just exist. They are there in their own right. We don’t ask, “Do you only drive for fun? Why are you on the road then?”​ Cars are seen as objects of care, politeness, and service (“I can give you a lift, so you don’t have to take the bus”).​ We even identify ourselves with cars (“I park over there”)​.

In a world built for cars, we have the urge to prove that cycling is justified. So we will lose.​ My take is that the private car is the problem. We should turn this around and make the car justify itself. If we have to move at all, we should make human-sized, human-propelled, human-speeded mobility the norm and benchmark.​

Funding, Methodology, Stance

Why are we, who call ourselves “cycling researchers,” such obedient servants to car centrism?​ I think there are many reasons for this. Let’s have a quick look at some of them, namely, funding, the methods we use, and our own stance on how we deal with our own topic. ​

​Funding steers. It’s hard to work without funding. Funding for “cycling” research often comes in small amounts, keeping us scrambling and busy with small incremental projects, preventing us from seeing the bigger picture.

And which industry has not only the financial muscles, but also a vested interest to support and thereby influence research in the transport area? As a crucial partner in a project, you get to influence the hypotheses, the research directions taken, which data are collected and which aren’t.​

As part of her doctoral thesis, Janet van der Meulen looked at whether and how cycling-related projects got funded by the Swedish Innovation Agency. According to their own description, they enable "innovation that provides sustainable solutions." The bike is not seen as innovative, except maybe when it's shared, and is therefore largely marginalised in the funded projects. Its very virtues – being low-cost, flexible, not traceable, usable by almost everyone, resilient and simple – make it uninteresting for "innovative research," which inevitably seems to mean technology and digitalisation. ​

Also, how research calls are phrased doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are lobby groups that shape and influence call texts. And all the just-named beneficial features of the bicycle and cycling as a means for mobility are not likely to generate strong lobby groups.​

So, desperate for some funding, we don't feel in a position to criticise and make demands.​

Our methods, key performance indicators, and terminology are car-anchored and tacitly accepted as standard; it is difficult to develop a fundamentally new approach. ​

When we publish, we are meant to refer back to previous work, but the previous work was done in a car-centric world.​ For decades, the idea of "traffic flow," efficiency, throughput and such have been entrenched in the transport system. They are the backbone of traffic models and have, for a long time, dictated how we design our cities and everything beyond them.

So it's natural that we talk about the same variables also in relation to cycling. If we have a hammer, we treat all problems as nails. If we have car-based performance indicators, we treat bikes as small cars. By default, we assume that the same values are important. We use models developed within a very engineering-based framework for car traffic and apply them to cycling. We judge cyclists by traffic rules that only exist because of cars. We buy the car-centric idea of "mutual responsibility" in traffic, and count cyclists rolling through stop signs.

It's hard to break free from this, as it means venturing into uncharted territory. It's also hard to break free from it, because not only as researchers, but also as cyclists, we are shaped and channelled by car-centrism. How should cyclists behave naturally when the world around them is already shaped for cars? If the design of public space allows cars everywhere, we are excited about a separate bike path, because the death toll is reduced – we have "saved lives"!​

We don't even think that there could be no cars, and that we then wouldn't even have to bother counting deaths.​

Why are we doing this?

To sum up, we are used to being grateful for the crumbs that fall off the car-world’s table and worry about even asking for the bare minimum. Out of fear of not being taken seriously, we keep demands and expectations low. We want to appear measured and sensible. But also, I think we have lost the ability to have a vision.​

These are a few of the reasons that I can see. But we cannot keep going on like this in a world that is collapsing in front of our very eyes. We have to be both self-critical and transformative, not tomorrow, but now.​

​So let’s try.​

How it could be, and is, in the Netherlands

A bicycle-friendly intersection in Aalsmeer, Netherlands. PHOTO: r/europe