Bicycles’ double learning: combining organization and transport research to explain the (un)sustainable urban transport paradox in Helsinki

During COVID, tactical urbanism was institutionalized by cities around the world to support cycling. Pop-up bike lanes became the latest representation of the sustainable transport paradigm. But in Helsinki, despite its previous transport innovations, this new policy trend remained absent. This article explores this paradoxical absence from two double perspectives: epistemic (empirical / theoretical) and disciplinary (within / outside transport research). Organizational studies are chosen as a suitable complementary discipline to transport research to explore this case study. It is operationalized combining a bottom-up, empirical, approach (stakeholders’ interviews) and a top-down, theoretical approach (finding fitting models from both disciplines: the experiential model in transport history and the paradox theory in management). The results reveal two contradictions: technical (double standards between cycling and automobility) and political (organizational contradiction between departments). This explains Helsinki’s apparent paradox as the outcome of a double learning process. Within transport, cycling learns from automobility (strategy of “cycling highways”) and within the organization, planners learn to manage the contradictions of sustainability (without resolving them). The findings are synthetized as suggesting a new hypothesis for the current trend of transport change as “involution within unsustainability”. The article thus advances interdisciplinary transportation research by combining theoretical perspectives from Organizational Studies and Sustainability Science with the empirical study of a specific transport policy case-study. Its takeaways may be used by transportation practitioners to overcome self-reinforcing cycles of organizational learning that support the status quo of automobility and unsustainable mobility in general.