Speakers
Description
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, there has been growing discussion of a ‘bicycle boom’ taking place around the world (Coulibaly, 2020). However, though a ‘bicycle boom’ may have occurred, critical analyses of cycling remains imperative, particularly since cycling may “reinforce the already existing social, spatial and racial fault lines within cities” (Doucet & Mazumder, 2020, para. 5). This is especially important as governments have historically favoured motorized transport (Porter, 2007), indicating there is a need to explore the policies that guide transportation development and infrastructure. Thus, the purpose of this presentation is to examine transportation policies in three different countries, Uganda, Nicaragua and Canada, specifically in relation to the ‘bicycle-for-development’ sector, whereby a number of organizations and local communities use the bicycle as a tool for addressing various development aims. In the first part of the presentation, we unpack the national and/or provincial laws associated with bicycling, including that of infrastructure, import and export laws, and ‘viewpoints’ of cycling by governments based on both grey literature and scholarly research. Second, we extend this overview of transportation policies with empirical data focused on the experiences of cyclists in each locality, and the noted benefits and challenges of bicycling and/for achieving social ‘development’ aims. Third, we discuss future research, policy, and practice in the BFD sector with a specific aim of enabling public advocacy by way of complementing policy with firsthand experiences and perspectives from cyclists ‘on-the-ground’.
