Bike Schools’ Impact on Disabled People and Cycling Inclusion

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper focuses on how bike schools can contribute to behavioural change for disabled people and their contribution to active travel, cycling inclusion and ultimately the green transition. Three Swedish bike schools have been studied, focusing on groups that experience marginalisation in the current automobility regime, including seniors, women with immigrant backgrounds and disabled people (n=25 interviews). The concepts of access, competence and embrace are applied to analyse and contrast the participants different potentials for cycling and for appropriating cycling in their everyday lives. While the bike schools for women with immigrant backgrounds showed a significant impact in terms of potential cycling uptake, this was less so for the disabled cyclists, who faced significant barriers to continue cycling independently. Despite expressing an ambition to continue cycling, they remained potential cyclists, as the transport system failed in realising their cycling participation outside the studied initiatives. The findings include several access frictions that the participants negotiate. These include frictions related to feeling vulnerable in traffic, dealing with interruptions in cycling practice and frictions related to care dependencies. This in turn provides qualitative accounts of disabled cyclists experiences, knowledge that can inform policy and planning to support more diverse groups to travel actively.