Commoning Cycling: Grassroot Initiatives for Inclusive Mobility Transitions Among People Facing Barriers to Cycling

Abstract

Improving the conditions for sustainable mobilities is the focus of considerable political and public attention. This paper identifies various ways that civil society initiatives promote cycling inclusion for marginalized groups facing barriers to cycling. An emphasis on commoning of cycling and cycling inclusion highlights how grassroot initiatives and their “commoners” take action to achieve an ambition to make cycling more inclusive in a bottom-up approach. In total, 12 initiatives have been studied, broadly categorized as bike kitchens, bike schools, bike to school, and bike promotion initiatives, located in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Romania, and Sweden, respectively. These initiatives address groups that experience marginalization in the current mobility system (i.e., women with immigrant background, children, people with disabilities, seniors), and promote cycling through various forms of learning activities and skills to lower the thresholds to cycling and making cycling more diversified. The paper takes a holistic approach to shed light on the various ways that grassroot initiatives promote cycling inclusion, and, based on the experiences of participants and facilitators, explores what such initiatives may achieve given differences in context and target groups. While the results show that cycling was mainly available for those participants that managed to adjust to the presumed norm of the confident, able-bodied, and individualized mobile subject, the initiatives had unexpected impacts on social dynamics of relevance to social justice. The results show the importance for cycling policy and planning to support concrete actions to improve the conditions for cycling to realize the full potential of cycling in the green transition.

Introduction

Currently, in many European Union (EU) countries and cities, getting more people on bikes and improving the conditions for sustainable mobilities is the focus of considerable political and public attention. The 2024 EU declaration on cycling commits to promote social inclusion by addressing the needs of women, children, older people and other vulnerable groups, and by facilitating improved access to cycling for persons with disabilities or those with reduced mobility ( 1 ). However, while policy debates on sustainability transitions often foreground reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and the promotion of circular economies, less attention has been devoted to the role of community empowerment and grassroot initiatives within this process, although they may have a crucial role in mobility transitions ( 2 ). Grassroot mobility initiatives, understood here as “the actions, projects, and/or schemes of activists and civic society organizations that seek to realize an ambition or goal, such as making more people cycle or walk, in a bottom-up manner” ( 3 ), often emerge where traditional policy mechanisms fall short, particularly for marginalized groups whose mobility needs are routinely neglected.

Grassroot efforts to promote cycling among disadvantaged populations—people and groups who, owing to gender, ethnicity, age, poverty, and disability, may experience inequalities in the current transport system—have begun to receive scholarly attention ( 3 – 8 ). However, more knowledge is needed on how such initiatives work; that is, what they do to facilitate mobility transitions in the context of social and mobility disadvantage ( 9 ). Our study included 12 grassroot initiatives from six European countries that address groups experiencing disadvantage in the current mobility system, promoting cycling through various forms of learning activities to reduce barriers to cycling. We refer to the cycling initiatives as a way of commoning mobility to promote more just, inclusive and greener mobilities ( 10 ). Specifically, we view the initiatives we have examined as velomobile commons that share resources, spaces, and knowledge specifically centering on cycling. By doing so, they seek to enable “more sustainable and equitable mobility capabilities beyond the system of automobility” ( 6 ). We take inspiration from Lam ( 11 ) and Martens et al. ( 12 ) who call for cycling research to address wider social inequalities. The general aim of this research is twofold: a) to shed light on the various ways that grassroot initiatives promote cycling inclusion for groups that face barriers to cycling, and b) based on the experiences of participants and facilitators, explore what such initiatives may achieve given differences in context and target groups.

Against this background, this paper seeks to advance understanding of what different initiatives may accomplish in addressing the barriers to cycling experienced by disadvantaged groups. How do the participants reason about what they are learning and how they manage to overcome barriers to everyday cycling? What other aspects do they highlight as important concerning the initiatives? Previous research on grassroot cycling initiatives tends to keep a separate focus on specific forms of initiatives, such as bike kitchens, bike-to-school initiatives, and bike schools. By contrast, our research seeks to develop a more holistic understanding of different strategies of commoning cycling, based on how different initiatives respond to barriers for different marginalized and disadvantaged groups. Our analytical approach seeks to develop an in-depth investigation of the pathways toward inclusive mobility futures that these initiatives propose. To this end, drawing on Kaufman et al. ( 13 ) and van der Kloof ( 8 ), we use the concepts of access (to suitable bikes, suitable infrastructure, and resources such as time and money), competence (as in the skills to use the bike and ability to navigate in traffic), and embrace (values, motives, and actual behavior) to analyze participation and impact of cycling initiatives.

Our investigation targets several key analytical dimensions, specifically the strategies that initiatives employ in reaching their target groups, in supporting their participants toward gaining access, in developing their competencies and in motivating their embracement of cycling. We also address the impact the initiative has had considering the personal and external factors that enable or deter the adoption of cycling in participants’ everyday lives. In this respect, we examine barriers and enablers of access, competence, and embrace within the framework of cycling motility ( 14 – 16 ). This approach allows an understanding of how such initiatives promote cycling inclusion for marginalized groups, their recruitment strategies and outreach efforts, as well as other outcomes that may influence social inequalities. Therefore, the cycling motility approach extends existing knowledge by implementing a holistic approach to analyzing different forms of grassroots cycling initiatives across diverse European contexts. Moreover, we do this by situating these initiatives within broader debates on grassroot initiatives and sustainability transitions, showing how they contest dominant infrastructures and mobilize alternative pathways to change. Finally, it adds to theoretical debates in cycling inclusion and grassroots initiatives by advancing an understanding of cycling not only as a transport issue, but as a social and political practice.

We begin by reviewing relevant research on cycling disadvantage, mobility commons, and cycling inclusion. Then, we introduce the analytical framework. Next, we describe the research project’s outreach activities, their methods, and the research contexts. In the subsequent sections, we analyze and discuss the findings across four approaches to commoning cycling. In the conclusion, we discuss the research findings’ implications for policy.

Literature Review

Understanding Cycling Among Disadvantaged Populations

Although cycling is, in theory, a low-cost and easily accessible mode of transport “for everyone,” the cycling mobility system is not equally accessible to all in practice ( 17 , 18 ). As previous research suggests, part of the problem lies in dominant transport planning approaches, which tend to design infrastructures around the “presumed norm of solitary, individualized, rational, efficient, utility-maximizing, able-bodied mobile subject” ( 19 ). In doing so, these approaches also reflect traditional masculine norms and assumptions, affecting who can and cannot become a cyclist ( 19 , 20 ). Golub et al. ( 18 ) argue that for future cycling politics to truly enable safe and widespread cycling “for all,” it is necessary to move beyond a narrow focus on access, safety and personal risk as the primary challenges. They emphasize the importance of situating the lived experiences of bicycling within broader structures of social inequality, particularly those related to gender, class, and race ( 18 ). With more policies in place to support sustainable transport and the promotion of cycling, scholarly attention has been directed toward how cycling policy and planning has tended to benefit the abled bodied, the young(er), and the middle aged, particularly for middle-class white men, at the expense of women and children ( 3 , 5 , 21 , 22 ). These studies provide vital critiques that we draw on to unpack the lived experiences and specific mobility strategies of marginalized groups themselves.

Several contributions have illustrated the uneven social geographies of cycling. Steinbach et al. ( 17 ) show that ethnic minorities are underrepresented as cyclists in London, whereas Haustein et al. ( 23 ) find similar patterns among immigrants in Denmark and the Netherlands, despite overall high cycling rates. In their comparative study of Denmark and the Netherlands, both countries with comparative high levels of cycling, Haustein et al. found that immigrant’s cycle less than the native born ( 23 ). By contrast, Welsch et al. found that immigrants initially exhibit higher reliance on walking, cycling, and public transport compared with native born counterparts, but shift over time toward dominant mobility patterns, including cycling ( 24 ). Ravensbergen further contributes with insights on how the decisions to cycle or not relate to embodied identity and cycling ( 25 ). For example, minority group women may face normative barriers to cycle, based on perceptions that cycling unaccompanied is associated with promiscuousness and social shame ( 25 ). This work stresses that cycling uptake should not be understood as a simple matter of “individual choice,” a view also expressed by Plyushteva and Schwanen who argue that mobility decisions are constrained by the transport options available, the limitations of transport infrastructures, and precarious living conditions ( 26 ).

Along these lines of thought, mobility scholar Ana Davidson emphasizes the importance of examining how dominant narratives of mobility reproduce neoliberal, gendered, and racial hierarchies ( 20 ). She argues that mobility needs to be understood as situated in context-specific relations of power that ultimately configure possibilities for cycling and individuals’ ability to become cyclists. Similarly, Golub et al. argue for the importance of reducing the impacts of privileges in mobility advocacy to avoid biases toward experiences of the most privileged groups and that the perspectives of marginalized populations also need to be incorporated to achieve sustainable and just cycling futures ( 18 ). This approach includes critically considering how gender and other intersecting power differentials may (re)shape embodiments, social relations, cultural formations, and power dynamics in the promotion of cycling.

Grassroot Cycling Initiatives and Commoning Cycling

Previous research on the processes and factors that make cycling attractive and achievable for disadvantaged groups further suggests that different approaches are required compared with more general cycling promotion campaigns ( 8 ). Information that builds solely on promoting the positive outcomes of cycling is often inadequate since barriers for marginalized and disadvantaged groups are multifaced ( 8 ). These barriers include embodied exclusions, inequitable access to resources tied to territorial contexts, and a lack of representation in decision-making and planning ( 27 ). To address these challenges, it is crucial to provide concrete opportunities to acquire new skills, overcome mental barriers, build social infrastructures that support independent mobility, and ensure access to bikes adapted to the different needs of individuals ( 8 , 28 ).

Grassroot cycling initiatives support participants in overcoming barriers to cycling by providing access to safe spaces and hands-on support for building cycling competence. They also actively engage in creating inclusive mobility systems that foreground social justice, equity, and community participation ( 3 ). They tend to focus on addressing social needs rather than generating profit and are often driven by the pursuit of equality in local contexts and organized around volunteerism, project-based funding, and communal efforts ( 3 , 29 ). Therefore, grassroot initiatives promoting cycling also fall within the scope of the concept of “commoning mobility,” which frames community initiatives and social movements as forms of social infrastructures that can support mobility justice ( 6 , 10 , 30 ).

One important example of such initiatives is the global movement of “bike kitchens,” which offer do-it-yourself facilities for bicycle repairs ( 2 , 28 , 31 , 32 ). As pointed out by Silonsaari the main goal of bike workshops is to foster participant agency and autonomy in environments where the car is the main mode of transport by creating awareness on velomobility ( 7 ). Other forms of commoning cycling are bike schools that provide lessons for immigrant women, helping to reduce mobility disadvantages ( 8 , 33 ). Similarly, bike-to-school initiatives aim to promote everyday cycling among children and counteract the current decline in cycling rates among young people ( 34 – 36 ). Furthermore, Silonsaari’s study on velomobile commons for young people in marginalized neighborhoods in Amsterdam contributes with important insights on cycling promotion among intersectional marginalized groups ( 7 ). Silonsaari suggests that commoning should be conceptualized as a contextually contingent social mechanism and emphasizes the need for scholarly and practical understandings of its internal functioning, which highlights the importance of research focusing on the commoners and the initiatives in which they participate ( 7 ).

Methodology and Research Contexts

The approach for studying grassroot initiatives promotion of cycling inclusion for marginalized groups is based on a qualitative research design. The data collection consisted primarily of semi-structured interviews with participants, facilitators and other relevant informants, including potential participants in the grassroot cycling initiatives. The interviewers have done site observations to get a deeper contextual understanding of the initiative’s activities, the social interactions, training patterns and for recruiting research participants. To be able to overcome recruitment challenges, all partners used facilitators or organizers of the various initiatives as mediators to establish trust with participants.

Taken together, this research design allowed for developing an in-depth understanding of the initiatives (what they do), the participants’ background, their reasons for taking part, and behavioral changes (if occurred). In total 12 initiatives were studied. Table 1 outlines the main characteristics of these initiatives, as well as the roles held by the facilitators interviewed. In total, 30 facilitators were interviewed; 60% of the facilitators were women. Ages ranged from 21 to 78 years, but most (73%) were between 30 and 50 years old. In total, 56 individual participants or potential participants of these initiatives were interviewed. In addition, three group interviews encompassing a total of 30 young people aged 10–16 years were conducted in the Portuguese case studies. Appendix 1A presents the sample statistics of the participants and potential participants based on the overarching demographic assessment used for the research.

Table 1.

Initiatives Per Country and Interviewees

Country	Initiative description	Interviewees
Belgium	Case 1 is a bike school aimed at immigrant women. An NGO runs the initiative in cooperation with the municipality. A course of 15 steps is offered, led by a paid instructor from either the NGO or the municipality as well as several volunteers.	1 instructor employed by NGO, 1 instructor employed by municipality.4 participants, 1 non-participant.
	Case 2 The initiative consists of a bundle of lessons to be taught to pupils by teachers, with the support of an NGO. The lessons aim to engage pupils as active subjects concerning their own (sustainable) mobility.	1 co-creator of initiative, 1 school director, 3 teachers/facilitators.
Greece	Case 3 is a small bottom-up initiative that promotes cycling through various actions. The case study focused on their joint bike rides that target women living under poor socioeconomic conditions and other vulnerabilities to take up cycling for their everyday transport needs.	1 interview with president of the association who works on volunteer basis.10 participants.
Italy	Case 4 is a bike-to-school initiative that targets children and parents to support cycling to school. Located at the border between two multicultural and working-class urban areas. Relies on the voluntary participation of parents, but a cycling association involved receives some EU funding as part of Clean Cities Campaign.	1 interview with a teacher, and 2 interviews with parents involved in organizing bike rides, one is also member of the association involved.4 participants, 2 non-participants.
	Case 5 is a bike kitchen situated in a squatted building. Primarily promotes access and competence in bicycle repair skills for cyclists in Rome. Run by a small group of volunteers with no formal roles and materials used are recycled or donated.	2 volunteer facilitators from the bike kitchen.4 participants, 2 non-participants.
Portugal	Case 6 is run by a non-profit cooperative together with several local partners. Supported by city council and received some EU funding. Targets young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Activities include bicycle repair workshops, donating bikes, cycling lessons, bike tours.	1 representative from the cooperative leading the project, 4 representatives from partner associations (sports and cultural associations)1 individual and one group interview with participants, 2 non-participants.
	Case 7 is a bike kitchen in a community center located in a disadvantaged area, sponsored by a large charitable organization. Through other projects at the center, bikes are donated to those in need, and bike rides are organized for children.	1 employee at community center involved in several bike related projects.1 individual and 2 group interviews with participants.
Romania	Case 8: installs bike racks at schools to support students to take up cycling. Initiated and funded by a local IT company but maintained by the schools. The parents’ associations approved the plans and also helped promote the initiative.	1 parent involved in implementation, 1 representative from company funding initiative4 participants, 1 non-participant.
	Case 9 is a small bottom-up initiative run on a voluntary basis that targets the citizens of Iasi more generally to promote and support cycling to school, work and shops, largely through online campaigns.	1 of the organizers behind the initiative.4 participants, 1 non-participant.
Sweden	Case 10: is a tricycle school which targets older age seniors. The initiative gets some support from the municipality, but classes are run by volunteers from a cycling association. Established in 2017, average number of participants 6–8. Average age 79.	2 organizers, including one coordinator, and one volunteer7 participants
	Case 11: is a paracycling school which targets people with disabilities. The initiative gets some support from the municipality, but classes are run by volunteers from a cycling association. Established in 2017, average number of participants 4–5.	1 organizer specialized in bicycle training and paracycling.4 participants
	Case 12: Bike school aimed at immigrant women. Classes are held on a drop-in basis in a few different locations, and they are run by volunteers from an NGO. A local housing company and other NGOs help promote the initiative. Established in 2022, average number of participants 5–8.	4 organizers, including the NGO coordinator and three volunteers.4 participants

Note: EU = European Union; NGO = non-governmental organization.

The main selection criteria for cases were that they should have the aim of stimulating the use of bikes by supporting behavioral change; either focus on vulnerable groups and/or vulnerable areas and represent hands-on intervention(s) that have the potential to produce a change in behavior for people taking part in them. They should be ongoing and not one-off events. There are differences in the initiatives available which met these criteria, and the availability and variances of initiatives mirror the extent to which cycling is on the political agenda within the respective countries; part of wider pro-cycling policies; and the extent to which cycling is part of bottom-up initiatives’ agendas. Sweden, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal had more ongoing initiatives available to choose from, the availability of initiatives in Greece and Romania was scarce. Greece managed to find a bicycle organization working with bike social events in Thessaloniki. Romania focused on initiatives that support cycling uptake through bike security (bike racks/bike security) and promotion campaigns for increased commuting by bike in the city of Iasi. The initiatives also reflect different forms of platforms, yet mainly non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and sports organizations. The “bikeability context” of each country is described briefly in Table 2; that is, the hosting potential of the context to facilitate change or not ( 34 , 37 ). There are great differences in bikeability across the different case study sites, with Sweden and Belgium representing more cycling friendly infrastructures compared with the cases of Romania, Greece, Italy, and Portugal.

Table 2.

Bikeability Context Per Country

Belgium is a relatively bike-friendly country and has adequate-to-extensive cycling infrastructure. Flanders, where both Belgian case studies are located, has flat terrain, which means that cyclists can get around with relative ease. Infrastructural provisions for cyclists like cycling streets and bicycle lanes, are available especially in urban areas.In Greece, the municipality of Thessaloniki where the case study is located, has no specific plans for ensuring equity in cycling and there is almost no planning for bikes in general. The few existing bike lanes are poorly maintained.In Italy, including in the two neighborhoods in Rome where the case studies were conducted, bike infrastructure is underdeveloped. The few existing bike lanes are narrow and often obstructed by parked cars. Cycling is generally not used as an everyday means of transport.In Lisbon, Portugal, particularly in the case study areas, cycling is rarely used as a mode of transport. This is attributable to several factors, including: lacking competence in using bikes, the absence of adequate cycling infrastructure and safety concerns; as well as topographic, socio-economic and cultural factors.In Iasi, Romania, geographic conditions are suitable for cycling, but the limited bike infrastructure in place is not well constructed. Connectivity between bike lanes is low and poorly signaled. The car norm is strong.In Sweden, the two urban municipalities where the case studies are located both have well-developed cycling path networks and actively support cycling to increase its mobility share. There are limited topographic challenges and cycling is generally considered a “normal” mode of transport.

Analytical Procedures

The analytical procedures followed the same steps for data collection across all initiatives. Interview grids were the same for all sub-studies (see Appendix 1B, 1C), and identical reporting grids were used to ensure coherence and comparability in data collection, reporting and analysis. In the grid, the rapporteur was asked to report demographic background information about the informant, including inequalities, enabling/hindering factors for taking up cycling as related to individual recourses (time, money, etc.), social dynamics (community, family support, etc.), and structural conditions (infrastructure). This is followed by a summary of the studied cycling initiative, a description of the participants’ current transport situation, their motives for joining the initiative, the participants’ experience from the initiative, and outcomes related to cycling uptake. Second, the interviews, desk research and any observations from the case studies was summarized in six country-level reports. Researchers were asked to provide a summary of what the interviews revealed about the impacts that the initiatives had across the three key barriers studied; that is, competence, access, and embrace. Third, the interview grids and country level reports where further analyzed in the context of the mobility research, situating them in relation to sociocultural context and materiality, further analyzed with regards to how the initiatives facilitate cycling inclusion in their activities and outreach activities, what they do to lower barriers to cycling and to what extent the participants say they managed to take up cycling in their everyday life or not.

Results

This section examines the different approaches for commoning cycling observed in our data, which we have categorized into four interrelated domains: developing cycling competences, supporting children’s cycling, building material capacities, and fostering cycling communities. While these domains are presented separately for analytical clarity, they are deeply interconnected in practice. See Table 3 for an overview of the commoning approaches and the initiatives included in each category. In the following section, we present their outreach activities and inclusion efforts, followed by sections outlining the four commoning approaches focusing on how the initiatives facilitate change for people facing barriers to cycling.

Table 3.

Commoning Approaches and Distribution of Initiatives

Commoning approach	Description	Cases and target groups
Developing competences	Initiatives included within this approach are bike schools that teach participants how to ride a bike and improve their cycling competences.	Case 1 (BE) and Case 12 (SE) target immigrant women. Case 10 (SE) and Case 11 (SE) are tricycle schools for older and disabled individuals.
Supporting children’s cycling	Initiatives aimed specifically toward children may incorporate elements of all three approaches, but they are placed in a separate category to highlight how these initiatives are guided by 1) children’s specific vulnerabilities in traffic and 2) children’s crucial role in future sustainability.	Case 4 (IT) is a bike-to-school initiative for third, fourth and fifth graders that requires support from parents, Case 2 (BE) promotes biking to school through more comprehensive educational efforts.Case 6 (PT), Case 7 (PT) are broader initiatives but include children as one of their main target groups.
Building material capacities	Includes initiatives aimed at the material aspects of biking. This includes bike kitchens where one can learn to repair a bike, initiatives where one can obtain a bike for free (on loan or to keep), as well as initiatives aimed at the safe storage of bikes.	Case 5 (IT), Case 6 (PT), Case 7 (PT), are bike kitchens, the latter two also offer additional services and particularly support children’s cycling. Case 8 (RO) has the narrower aim of installing safe and accessible bike racks in schools.
Fostering cycling communities	Initiatives included within this approach encourage the use of bikes as a means of everyday transportation and/or as a communal activity. Access to a bike and basic biking competence is typically a precondition.	Case 3 (GR) and Case 9 (RO) both promote cycling in a broad sense; the main target groups are people who already have some cycling competence.

Note: BE = Belgium; SE = Sweden; IT = Italy; PT = Portugal; GR = Greece; RO = Romania.

Outreach Strategies

For understanding cycling inclusion and the ways that the initiatives common cycling, we have asked about their recruitment strategies and outreach efforts. Among initiatives categorized as developing competences, the bike schools for women with immigrant background reported having developed specific outreach strategies. Henrietta, the coordinator of the Swedish bike school, speaks about the importance of devoting time to build trust with immigrant communities, who generally have very low trust in official bodies such as the municipality or the state. “Therefore, I recruit participants through other activities, like YMCA, where the mothers do sports. I joined there to be able to get to know the women and convey that the cycling school existed, through that I made contact and created trust.” Tania, one of the facilitators for the Belgian bike school says they had to put extra effort into promoting the initiative among the target groups. Over time, both initiatives have become well-known and managed to gain trust with their target group. In addition, the Swedish bike school were separatist for women only. Henrietta says “if there were men involved there would have been a difference. And that would have been a barrier [for women].” The situation is somewhat different for the trike bike schools, which had facilitators of different ages, genders and disabilities, with an explicit ambition to normalize the presence of disabled people in the role as instructors to attract participants.

Among initiatives supporting cycling among children their outreach activities differed according to initiative target group. The Italian bike-to-school initiative (Case 4) targets participants from the entire school. The school is very multicultural, and half of the families have immigrant backgrounds, but the participating groups tend to be Italian. Despite their all-welcome approach and use of multi-language communication, inclusion challenges remain. The organizer Marco explains that “Bike to School was born out of the will of parents.” The initiative is depending on that “parents want to take their children on a bike and want them to cycle.” The organizer Benedetta says it is hard to know if parents with a migration background “do not participate because they did not understand or if they do not consider participation important.” While this initiative raises the challenges of recruiting parents as facilitators, other bike-to-school initiatives are less dependent on parents’ support. By contrast, the Belgian bike-to-school initiative (Case 2) focuses on students in specific school classes—with the aim to get pupils involved in cycling and their broader mobility needs. Whether they participate or not depends on whether the school they are enrolled in has adopted the initiative or not.

Other initiatives that support cycling among children are the Lisbon bike kitchens, initiatives that also build material capacities. In the Lisbon bike kitchens, participants vary in age and ethnicity, from younger children to older teens, both native, immigrants and ethnic minorities, mostly young men. These initiatives are cooperatives established to foster projects with both environmental and social impact. This is done in collaboration with a broad network of local organizations (Case 6), and through religious organizations and the Lisbon city council among others (Case 7). Their outreach activities are directed through associations or people who know the community. By organizing community events and pop-up activities, the bike kitchens attract attention and interest from local youth, most often young boys. Like in the case of the Swedish bike school mentioned above, the Lisbon bike kitchen (Case 6) noted how the presence of women facilitators had significantly positive impacts on girls and women taking part in the activities.

Other initiatives supporting the building of material capacities; that is, initiatives aimed at the material aspects of biking, several outreach approaches are used—depending on their specific approach to commoning cycling. The Romanian initiative that installed safe and accessible bike racks in schools did not make any specific outreach activities other than an inauguration the bike racks. By contrast, the Italian bike kitchen (Case 5) train participants to repair and maintain bicycles. As for the target group, the volunteer Graig says that the cycle workshops are for all kinds of people: “We’re trying to improve society with bicycles, and not only that, but we also want to be inclusive.” Volunteers build peoples capacities in mending bikes and seek to produce a strong community through bike activism. The people who visit the bike kitchen generally share left-wing values and are mostly from the middle or upper-middle social classes, that may also exclude participants who do not subscribe to the activist approach.

The initiatives categorized as primarily focusing on fostering cycling communities, used different outreach strategies. The Romanian bike initiative (Case 9) support cycling as a form of sustainable mobility in the city Iasi—a city with close to 300 000 inhabitations with lacking cycling infrastructure. Using social media and word of mouth, they managed to reach both vulnerable and marginalized groups with socioeconomic difficulties, especially among students, employees, and members of the community in the initiative. The Greek initiative (Case 3) organizes events for the promotion of cycling and sustainable mobility within the urban Thessaloniki. Through their actions in second-chance schools and in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the initiative reaches out to marginalized individuals, especially women, via social media. The core members and organizers are women, this in turn was described as a significant factor for attracting other women to feel comfortable and inspired to take part. The participants Kiki says that the presence of women “automatically makes it look like it is possible for us [women] to participate actively in cycling activities.” The main outreach barriers are lack of volunteers, time, and funding.

In sum, identified factors for successful outreach are the combination of time, developed strategies, and networks for communication with target groups and initiative. A dominant narrative across the interviews with bike schools is that it is in general difficult to recruit volunteers ( 38 ). This in turn makes it difficult to plan and scale up the initiatives. Enabling factors to attract women was the presence of women organizers and separatist bike schools. Hindering factors for diversity was connected to participants’ capacity and willingness to devote time to the initiative, either as participants themselves or as parents supporting their children’s cycling. Some of the initiatives managed to form strong cycling communities among their participants, which potentially could limit reaching out to participants outside the core group of often middle-class, ethnic majority participants.

Developing Competences

Bike schools develop cycling competence for their participants by proving suitable bikes, instructions how to use them, and a safe space to practice. There are four bike schools in the sample, two Swedish trike bike schools targeting seniors and disabled people respectively, and two bike schools targeting women with immigrant background located in Belgium and Sweden. Their challenges are different, depending on their respective target groups. Eskil, the facilitator of the Swedish trike bike school, explains that the initiative initially focused on rehabilitation and paracycling. However, the organization later aimed to broaden its scope to include senior participants. According to Eskil, this shift involved several considerations. While the original emphasis was on enabling individuals with disabilities to engage in competitive cycling, incorporating seniors into the practice introduced a different focus—less on competition and more on supporting continued engagement in cycling as part of everyday life and well-being.

Most senior participants had cycled all their life, but for various reasons were no longer able to use a regular bike. They may have been in accidents, or faced balance problems, and had joined the initiative to learn how to use a trike bike and continue cycling. However, the transfer from two wheels to three wheels was a challenge. Hanna, 77 years old says: “It feels terrible, it should just be to get up and get going, but it feels like you’re about to fall.” The fear of falling that Hanna talks about was an initial concern for all interviewed trike participants, a barrier that the initiative helped them to overcome. However, even though the initiative supported them in using a trike bike, and even though there were well-developed cycling networks available, 6 out of 8 participants said they would not continue cycling in their everyday lives—mainly because they felt insecure sharing bike lanes with other faster cyclists and scooters.

Apart from offering support to overcome barriers to take up trike cycling, the initiative devotes a significant amount of time to social activities. The training sessions are equally divided into one hour cycling practice, and one hour socializing and coffee. For most participants, the initiative thereby contributed to break social isolation and was by some considered more important than the cycling. Mimmi says she is mostly “at home these days” but that the initiative does support her to get out and about more. Hanna sees the initiative as much more than mere cycling: “I’m not here to just cycle around. I also make new friends.” All participants stress the importance of the social aspects of the initiative, and how it support their well-being. The paracycling participants showed similar patterns as the seniors with regards to breaking social isolation—but for this group the cycling practice was equally or more important ( 38 ).

Compared with the trike bike school, the bike schools for immigrant women face other forms of body/bike-related challenges, since the participants did not have previous knowledge in cycling. Here the support focuses on ways of overcoming potential language barriers. Instructions could be given in either Swedish or Dutch, as part of language training. Body language and language that centers on the bike and its parts are common. A few participants that suffered from genital mutilation faced great difficulties using standard bike saddles. Various support was offered to provide more comfortable saddles—gel-supported saddles and saddles in different shapes—which succeeded in some cases but not for all (Case 12). Other challenges are related to the participants’ time to take part in the training owing to care responsibilities. It was common for the bike schools to support progressions following a specific “step-by-step” schedule to support their learning to be able to cycle in traffic. However, they also experienced large dropouts from their courses since not all women succeeded in follow the entire course. Because of this, the Swedish bike school had developed a much simpler step-by-step program to support their participation rather than step-by-step progression. Here the main strategy was to keep a low threshold for participation (drop in), especially for women with care responsibilities.

Among the eight participants interviewed all increased competence, appreciating their progress as going from not being able to cycle to being able to cycle in a park or in traffic ( 38 ). The bike schools for women mainly helped them to overcome doubts and anxieties about their own abilities to cycle (i.e., fear of falling), though more experience to cycle in traffic seemed necessary for some participants to fully overcome these concerns. While very few of the seniors said they were to continue cycling outside the safe realm of the trike bike school, all the women with immigrant background anticipated continuing cycling. As able bodied and relatively young, the participants were able to improve their cycling abilities relatively fast, with the interviewees becoming more confident to cycle in a controlled environment (i.e., with an instructor present) and in most cases they were well on the way to cycle independently on the road. A contributing factor was that many of the participating women had very strong reasons to why they wanted to learn to cycle: for their employability, for social reasons, to be able to cycle with their kids, to reduce transport costs, for health reasons or for the environment—which have also been stressed in previous studies ( 8 , 33 ).

Cycling culture had a positive impact on their cycling participation in both the Swedish and Belgian cases. When moving to Sweden, Sabine (Case 12) realized how common it was to cycle, also for women, which pushed her to join the cycling school. “When you live in Sweden, you must be able to ride a bike, if you are an adult.” For Iman, (Case 1) living in Leuven, most of her female friends knew how to cycle—“I felt sorry that I could not go along.” With cycling being “common,” you simply had to learn for social reasons which support them to embrace cycling in everyday life. For mothers, their children’s cycling abilities further supported their cycling participation. For Amy, a 28-year-old Nigerian student currently living in Sweden, learning to bike was a way to accompany her daughter to daycare, “she can ride a bike as 6 years old, I must learn.” Similar examples exist in the Belgian case study. Samira, a 50-year-old woman with an 8-year-old daughter, is from a country where women are “not supposed to cycle”: “I was afraid, did not learn how to ride a bike as a child or adult, even though the idea was attractive.” Now she learns how to ride a bike to accompany her daughter (“She already bikes, so I cannot wait too long”) ( 38 ).

In sum, an important factor for developing cycling competence across all bike schools studied was that the schools provided safe spaces and hands-on support where participants could feel comfortable to practice without embarrassment. While the disabled and the seniors emphasized health and breaking social isolations as important reasons for participating in the initiatives, they often hesitated to cycle outside the initiative entirely, owing to lack of self-efficacy and feeling unsafe in traffic or because of being depending on access to special bikes.

Supporting Children’s Cycling

Bike initiatives common cycling by supporting and teaching children how to cycle to school and around the city (competence) and thereby facilitate a context where they can experience city cycling and feel like cyclists (embrace). The initiatives that support children’s or younger people’s cycling consists of bike kitchens and bike-to-school initiatives, and are quite different in their respective approaches.

The Italian bike-to-school initiative (Case 4) targets participants from the entire school, a multicultural school where half of the families have immigrant backgrounds, but the participating groups tend to be mainly Italian. For those families who do have the time and capacity to participate, taking part in the initiative contributes to strengthening feelings of support as part of a wider community of cyclists. For the already convinced participants, embrace was primarily strengthened for the participating families—3 out of 4 of the interviewed parents already cycled daily. According to the parents, the children wanted to bike on a more regular basis after the initiative, not just as a hobby. Challenges remained to find ways to support cycling and inclusion for more marginalized families in the area. Benedetta, one of the organizers, notes that access to bikes and parents’ perceptions of cycling act as barriers to children’s participation in the bike-to-school initiative:

We imagined that in our classes all families and all Italian children had a bicycle and knew how to ride it, but we found out that this is not the case in other families. […] Many children don’t know how to ride a bicycle without training wheels even if they are already 8/9/10 years old, and many parents have never encouraged them to ride a bicycle. […] And it struck me that many parents are worried about the bicycle because children can fall off, hurt themselves, etc. This is also passed on to children who feel a fear of cycling because of their parents and have struggled to learn.

These findings are in line with previous studies that raise the importance of parents’ cycling (in)ability as barrier and enabler of children’s active mobility in disadvantaged neighborhoods ( 39 ). However, we can also see that children may support parents cycling practices, as was the case with the bike school for women with immigrant background discussed in the previous section.

By contrast, the Belgian initiative (Case 2) focuses on students in specific school classes—with the aim to get pupils involved in cycling and their broader environments/mobility needs. The initiative facilitates change toward more inclusive cycling through motivating children to bike to school, as well as addressing unsafety and the perceived unsafety by parents. Michael, one of the organizers of the initiative, explains more:

The children are free to think about mobility in their own way and think about why they come to school by car, for example, instead of by foot or by bike. We encourage critical thinking so that they reflect on how safe the streets near their school are, or whether there are cycling paths that they can take to school.

For Michael, cycling plays an important role in the project “as issues and solutions for safety, liveability, health, and environmental sustainability all come together in this one mode of transport.” Through the initiative, children are encouraged to question their own mobility habits and potentially feel encouraged to switch to more sustainable modes of transport like cycling. However, most of the pupils indicated that in general, the initiative did not lead them to cycle more often. Ideally, parents get involved in the project so that they can be supportive of their children within the framework of this initiative. However, teachers were worried over the increased lack of traffic insight and even motoric skills among some pupils, suspecting the parents to be increasingly or even excessively “overprotective.” While we find it difficult to appreciate any long-term consequences already, while the main beneficiaries—the children—are involved in co-creating solutions to the mobility issues that characterize their area will likely give them a sense of ownership.

In sum, while support from schools and teachers are enabling factors for developing cycling competence for children, the studied initiatives put focus on parents as hindering and enabling factors for children’s capacity to cycle. As in the Italian bike-to-school case, the parents’ dedication to cycling and their engagement in the initiative was a strong enabling factor for supporting children’s cycling in a highly car dominated city such as Rome. By contrast, in the Belgian case, the parents were rather considered to be inhibiting change as they tended to prevent their children from cycling to school (on their own) because of concerns about road safety—a problem that has been raised in several studies ( 34 , 39 , 40 ). Potentially, the school and wider neighborhoods may benefit from initiatives like these since they get to engage with the perspective of the children on mobility issues and can make use of the suggestions for change that pupils, teachers and parents have come up with.

Building Material Capacities

Access to bicycles, tools, and repair knowledge remains a significant barrier for many marginalized groups. Bike kitchens—community-based repair workshops—address this by providing mechanical support and empowering participants to maintain their own bicycles. Two models were studied: the activist-oriented bike kitchen in Rome (Case 5) and two more socially oriented projects/bicycle workshops in Lisbon supporting cycling among children and local youth (Cases 6 and 7). The bike kitchens studied represent contrasting cases concerning goals, outreach, and the role of bikes in facilitating change.

The facilitator of the Italian activist bike kitchen, Riccardo, find the Roman bike kitchen “a stepping stone for abandoning old habits and learning new ones.” The activist-oriented participants talked about feeling marginalized as cyclists in car dominated city, and that the bike kitchen provided a strong sense of community and strengthened their capacity to embrace and support cycling in the city. While the Roman bike kitchen was run by a few dedicated volunteers, the Lisbon bike kitchens employ a diverse team of staff and facilitators from various backgrounds, including bicycle mechanics, social workers, educators, and community members. This team is responsible for the day-to-day operations, including running workshops, organizing events, and engaging with participants. Apart from teaching mechanical skills and access the bikes, the Lisbon initiatives also offered leisure bike rides to different parts of the city for local youth. The facilitators emphasized that material infrastructure—such as tools, bikes, and workshops—serves to achieve broader goals like autonomy, competence, and inclusion. Duarte, a facilitator from Case 7, says that these spaces cultivate an environment of social cohesion: “a meeting point where people can help each other and share resources and knowledge.” The project leader Cláudia (Case 6) also emphasized a youth empowerment ethos. She described the approach as giving youth “tools to change their lives,” linking technical learning with confidence building and a sense of civic participation. While the young people themselves said that the initiative gave them the opportunity to gain mobility and explore areas beyond their immediate neighborhood by bike, the participants said they preferred cars and motorbikes as their desired means of future (adult) transportation.

The Romanian initiative (Case 8) provides access to bike racks for young people to keep the bike while in school. As other studies have pointed to, the risk of theft is a “nagging worry” for cyclists, and that knowing there is safe parking available can have a positive impact on cycling uptake ( 41 ). The impacts from the Romanian initiative to install bike racks are still difficult to estimate. Even though some of the interviewees were using bikes before the bike racks were made available, three out of four female student participants reported biking more frequently after the racks had been installed. They say that the availability of bike racks became a factor for community building among student cyclists. Ioana notes: “I remembered that we took several pictures during the inauguration and put them on Instagram. The event felt special to us, gave us a reason to get together in the school yard.” Ioana was not cycling before she became a student but was convinced by her classmate to try cycling. Afterwards, she took some cycling classes, and her parents bought her a bike, and she now uses her bike regularly. Mara and Ioana both made new friendships among their classmates formed around cycling and are going biking in the city after classes. For Mara, Ioana, and Ana, the instalment of the bike racks initiated a wider process of change for them, including community building and establishment of new friendships.

In sum, initiatives that build material capacities facilitate change by enhancing participants’ access to bicycles, supporting their skills in riding and maintaining bikes, and encouraged cycling activities that support community building. The social support from each other, from other students, family and friends, enabled them to at least partially overcome barriers related to infrastructure built for cars and motorists. The Roman bike kitchen was explicitly “anti car” and “anti-capitalist” activist oriented toward improving the transport system for cyclists, while the Lisbon bike kitchens primarily use bicycles to target social inequalities in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Both initiatives managed to produce a sense of community formed around cycling. By contrast to the Italian activist bike kitchen, the Lisbon bike kitchen’s impact on the participants’ embrace remains modest, as the participants preferred motorized transport as their future everyday mobility. This in turn reflects the importance of considering the politics of mobility transition as situated in historically entrenched patterns of inequality. For example, their relatively weak embrace can be related to social stigma and prejudice about cycling as a transportation mode for the poor ( 27 ). Nikolaeva et al. note that poverty, and segregation experienced by poor and ethnic minorities may lead to a particularly strong desire for car ownership, since cars serves as a symbol of status ( 30 ).

Fostering Cycling Communities

Initiatives clustered under this headline support cycling uptake in a more general way compared with the specialized initiatives discussed above. The studied initiatives support cycling mainly for able-bodied adults and students, which includes marginalized and vulnerable groups. Moreover, they do so in contexts where cycling is neglected and lacking suitable infrastructure. The bike promotion initiatives studied are mainly non-profit organizations in wider alliances seeking to provide platforms for bike promotion and cycling communities.

The Greek initiative (Case 3) supports cycling by organizing events for the promotion of cycling and the principle of sustainable mobility within the urban Thessaloniki. The initiative was open to anyone wanting to join and managed to attract people with various vulnerabilities, including socioeconomic and psychological difficulties, others joined to learn cycling in the city with more confidence—mostly women but also some old(er) men. The participants talk about the initiative as contributing to their increased confidence in cycling and to feelings of increased independence and empowerment. After having taken part in the Thessaloniki sports organization’s actions (Case 3), all ten interviewed participants said they intended to change their mobility habits to more cycling. From mainly using the bike around their neighborhood and mainly for leisure, participants started cycling daily to commute to the city center for work or to do everyday activities.

Participants were motivated to start cycling because of health reasons, owing to a poor financial situation, or both. As an illustrative example, we turn to Kiki, a 30-year-old unemployed woman who lives with her mother in a small apartment in the eastern part of Thessaloniki. After losing her job owing to COVID she became unemployed and was later diagnosed with depression. She started cycling to deal with her depression, but was very afraid at first. After finding out online about the association, she joined one of their regular bike activities and since then she started gradually using her bicycle in her everyday life. The initiative introduced cycling as a mode of transport available to her:

I just didn’t know it was possible. It was not in my “vocabulary”. I was raised in a neighbourhood where there were no cyclists. Almost everybody owned a car, and those who didn’t just took the bus. So, it is basically that I never thought about it.

Nowadays she is moving exclusively by bike, and she feels more positive about re-entering the workforce and society in general. The combination of participants motivation to cycle and that the initiative managed to create a women inclusive learning environment, are factors that strengthened the participants to overcome their initial fear of cycling and gain confidence in cycling. Zeta, who is 18 years old, says: “I believed that there were many more dangers than there were. I always had in my mind that it was very difficult to cycle in the road.” As the bike lanes in Thessaloniki are shared with motorized traffic, cycling can be unpleasant, participants learned to safely navigate the city and improve their confidence and feeling of safety.

The initiative contributed to forming cycling communities that could build the participants’ capacity to take up cycling also in highly car dense cities. For Kiki, getting on the bike enabled her to see cyclists differently and to reconsider what “type” of person a cyclist can be: “I believed that it was for the most fit ones, that had experience and did it only for their health.” After two years of cycling, she knows a lot of people that use their bike for going to work or to do their shopping, “unfortunately, the city does not support cycling at all, and that’s a shame.” Similarly, Vera, a 50-year-old mother of two, says that cycling enabled her to “see” the city and its cyclists in a way that she could not before:

If you asked me a couple of years ago, I would say that there were no cyclists at all. But now that I’m a cyclist myself I happen to see many people who cycle every day to work. I see both men and women, but mostly men. I don’t see a lot of old people or kids, and this has to do with safety, I think. It’s very dangerous nowadays to cycle in the city. Who would trust their kid with a bike to move around in this heavy traffic?

As cyclist Vera not only see other cyclists, but also notes for whom cycling is available in the city. With mostly young(er) and old(er) aged cyclists being less present—owing to safety barriers.

The Romanian initiative (Case 9) showed similar results in cycling uptake. The initiative was a social media campaign that encouraged individuals to see cycling as a mode of transportation that could respond to their mobility needs and enhance physical and mental health. Most of the interviewed participants (4 out of 5) reported an increase in embrace and cycling competence after having participated in the campaign. The initiative supported participants to start cycling by developing participants’ competence in how to find safe cycling routes, by providing them with a sense of a community in a city where cycling is less common. Alin, a 22-year-old man living in Iasi, found out about the initiative from a co-worker who was cycling to work. His main motivation was to find a more sustainable means of transportation, both concerning financial reasons and for physical health. The initiative supports him to cycle more in the city, make friends and spend quality time with colleagues. As Alin stated: “When we go cycling, that’s what defines us.”

In sum, the bike promotion initiatives provided potential cyclists with a sense of safe spaces for developing their cycling competences in car dense cities. The initiatives managed to form cycling communities with impacts on the participants cycling habits, social relations and cycling embrace. Personal motivations were contributing factors for change, such as a wish to find more sustainable transport and personal well-being. Other contributing factors for change were how cycling was associated with values such as saving money, friendship, and increased independence.

Discussion

This paper has analyzed various ways that civil society initiatives promote cycling inclusion for marginalized groups, with a particular focus on different strategies for commoning cycling, namely: developing competencies, supporting children’s cycling, building material capacities, and fostering cycling communities. Our aim was to shed light on how grassroot initiatives promote cycling inclusion and explore what such initiatives may achieve given differences in context and target groups. As summarized in Table 4, the contributions of the studied initiatives extend beyond increasing cycling among groups that are experiencing marginalization in the current mobility system. They also build confidence and spatial belonging, break social isolation, and provides a sense of empowerment and support for spatial belonging for diverse cyclists, also in highly car dense contexts. Key challenges for realizing cycling are unsafe infrastructures, parental fears for children’s safety, and limited impacts owing to lack of policy and infrastructural support.

Table 4.

Summary of Initiatives Strategies for Commoning Cycling, Their Primary Contributions to Cycling Inclusion, and the Key Challenges Encountered

Approach	Initiative	Focus	Key contributions	Challenges
Developing Competences	Bike schools	Skills acquisition	Builds confidence and spatial belonging, breaking social isolation	Unsafe infrastructures
Supporting Children’s Cycling	Bike to school, Bike kitchens	Early habit formation, critical thinking	Normalizes cycling practices, community building	Outreach challenges: Parental fears; infrastructural deficits
Building Material Capacities	Bike kitchens; Bike racks	Affordable access, technical knowledge	Promotes autonomy and repair cultures, community building	Outreach challenges; cars as symbols of status
Fostering Cycling Communities	Bike social	Skills acquisition	Legitimizes diverse cycling identities, community building	Lack of policy and infrastructure support

The encouragement from social communities runs as a red thread through all initiatives as an important enabler for supporting cycling and facilitating cycling capacity. The Italian bike kitchen (Case 5) noted how the initiative made people feel empowered to find a like-minded group that helps them validate their choices, making them feel included and giving them the moral support to keep pedaling. The Italian bike-to-school case (4) reported that people participating in the initiative emphasized how they felt part of a cycling community. The Romanian (3) and Greek (9) initiatives managed to form cycling communities with impacts on the participants’ cycling habits, social relations, and cycling uptake. Less expectedly perhaps, was that the availability of bike racks in the Romanian Case 8 became a factor for community building among student cyclists.

In their study on community-driven mobility practices, Santala et al. observe that various types of close-knit social communities can both constrain and facilitate sustainable mobility practices ( 42 ). In our case did participants find support for change in their cycling communities and developed strategies to fend for their safety (i.e., find safer routes, find ways of taking up space as cyclists, practice cycling in groups to build capacity). While support from schools and teachers was enabling factors for developing cycling competence for children, the role of parents was an ambivalent factor as they could be both supporters and barriers to (children’s) cycling. This ambivalence mirrors the complex ways that mobility practices in households are intertwined with other household members’ mobilities, including how parents with children commute to (pre)school and work ( 42 , 43 ). The obtained results are in line with previous research by a study by Muñoz et al. ( 44 ), which confirmed that positive social norms surrounding cycling (i.e., peer support and societal acceptance) significantly increase the likelihood that individuals will choose cycling over other forms of transportation. However, social norms and “mobility milestones” (such as reaching the legal age for a driver’s license) can also take less sustainable routes, as in the case of Lisbon where young people longed for cars as a way of signaling status and adulthood ( 30 , 42 ).

Cycling safety comes forth as an overarching key barrier for cycling inclusion across all studied initiatives—with different effects across intersections of age and bodily ability ( 25 ). Ultimately, underrepresented groups can build the courage to take up cycling, and as such move from the “safe space” that the initiatives provide, to the “brave space” of the everyday traffic ( 45 ). While the initiatives all succeeded in lowering barriers for cycling for their participants, it was mainly the able-bodied, adult women who managed to become cyclists in everyday life; that is, those subjects that managed to adjust to the presumed norm of the confident, able-bodied and individualized mobile subject ( 19 ). In cases in which cycling has not been available to them previously, contextual factors such as a strong cycling culture had a supportive effect.

In addition, some of the interviewed women talked about cycling with their children as a supporting factor for them taking up cycling. While previous findings suggest that the (in)ability of parents’ cycling ability may hinder children’s active mobility in disadvantaged neighborhoods ( 39 ), the present findings suggest that children also support parents’ cycling practices. Our study shows that children’s cycling capacity supports their mothers’ motives to take up cycling ( 9 ). While children are often marginalized in adult-centric cycling discourses, spaces, and cycling policy, our results point to the importance of understanding the role that children play in the intersections of cultural conceptions around parenthood, childhood and mobility futures ( 40 ). As exemplified in the Belgian Case 2, the involved pupils attained more insight into the traffic conditions of their neighborhoods and school areas. In theory, it potentially strengthens their sense of capacity to influence the shaping of their living environments.

While all cyclists are vulnerable in cities/places made for cars, some cyclists are more at odds with the present transport systems across the sites, namely those who are simultaneously vulnerable and dependent on support (i.e., children, seniors, disabled). Even though the initiatives managed to lower barriers for disabled people and old(er) seniors to develop cycling competence using trike bikes, these groups rarely cycled on an everyday basis. This was attributable to lack of self-efficacy and because of feeling unsafe in traffic—even in contexts where cycling infrastructure is well developed like Sweden. However, we also note how initiatives had impacts beyond mere transport. Many participants reported that they felt empowered, gained independence and managed to break social isolation through participating in the initiatives. The Greek case showed some impressive results in this regard, where participants felt supported to adopt more sustainable means of transport in their everyday life.

Despite differences in bikeability across the case study sites (see Table 2), the result from this study suggests that grassroot initiatives can make cycling feasible even in cities where the conditions for cycling are poor. The findings show the potential of cycling initiatives to improve bikeability for vulnerable and marginalized groups and strengthen their capacity to take up cycling also in highly car dense cities. However, since cycling is not equally accessible for all, a holistic approach to commoning cycling is needed that builds on an intersectional understanding of mobile bodies as simultaneously gendered, raced, aged, (dis)abled, and so on.

The main barriers for outreach, including diverse recruitment, were lack of time, energy, and volunteers. Despite efforts to be inclusive, some of the initiatives had problems reaching outside of the typical ingroup of convinced cyclists and families (for example, the Italian bike-to-school initiative, and bike kitchen). Successful outreach activities encompassed to establish trust with potential participants through direct contact, or via relevant organizations and platforms, to lower their threshold to participate. Diversity in staff and the facilitation of women-only spaces and the presence of women facilitators had significantly positive impacts on girls and women taking part in the activities.

Limitations

Our research has several limitations. While the qualitative design of the study enabled rich insights into grassroots cycling promotion across diverse socio-political contexts, it also posed certain challenges. The reliance on self-reported behavior changes introduces the potential for social desirability bias. As mentioned above, to mitigate these risks, we employed common data collection instruments across all case studies, complemented field interviews with onsite observations, and considered contextual differences during analysis. The intention of the paper is to describe and understand the initiatives rather than evaluate them. These limitations must be kept in mind when interpreting the study’s results, especially concerning the generalizability of findings across highly diverse national and local contexts.

Conclusion

This study has emphasized the importance of identifying the various ways grassroots initiatives promote cycling inclusion for marginalized groups facing barriers to cycling, and how such initiatives can contribute to making cycling achievable and inclusive through diverse learning activities and skill-building efforts. The four approaches taken by grassroots initiatives for commoning cycling offer different but interconnected pathways toward inclusive mobility futures. Moreover, each strategy addresses specific barriers related to access, competence, and embrace, yet also faces distinct limitations shaped by broader socio-political and infrastructural conditions. Our research shows that commoning cycling addresses embodied competences, material infrastructures, cultural imaginaries about who can become cyclist, and collective agency simultaneously, offering important but partial pathways toward more inclusive urban mobility futures. Together, the study has highlighted the need for cycling transitions that address these barriers and conditions in an integrated manner. However, our results also suggest that grassroots initiatives operate under significant structural constraints. Infrastructural neglect, socio-economic inequalities, gendered and aged exclusions, and the enduring dominance of automobility regimes profoundly shape the effectiveness and sustainability of commoning practices.

Our research makes contributions to the limited literature on grassroots initiatives in urban mobility ( 3 , 7 , 27 , 34 ). Critical scholarship emphasizes the need for future mobility imaginaries to produce alternative visions based on commoning, justice, and well-being as opposed to dominant themes of economic growth and commodification that is foregrounded in current systems of automobility ( 10 , 46 , 47 ). The main contribution of the research was the in-depth understanding of how different grassroots initiatives contributed to making cycling achievable and available also in contexts with comparably low “bikeability”, knowledge that can inform policy.

Based on our results, we recommend that policy makers and cycling-promotion actors prioritize creating concrete opportunities for marginalized (potential) cyclists to gain access to cycling and to develop cycling competence. Such efforts must be accompanied by systemic changes in infrastructure and planning that strengthen cycling cultures and enable the full potential of the examined initiatives to be realized. Further steps toward more inclusive cycling include actively listening to the initiatives and their expressed needs, as well as addressing context-specific barriers that affect the safety and inclusiveness of cycling environments. Ensuring stable, long-term funding for cycling-support initiatives is crucial for building trust within the communities they engage in. Reliable funding also enables a shift from sporadic, lower-impact activities to the kind of well-structured and effective programs for cycling inclusion exemplified by several of the initiatives in this study.

The initiatives studied all contributed to support cycling inclusion by strengthening local and regional cycling communities and pro-cycling activism, facilitating social cycling events, and pro-cycling infrastructure such as bike racks and bike-to-school routes for groups facing barriers to cycling. As noted by Nixon and Schwanen ( 3 ), grassroots initiatives develop “capabilities for addressing transport poverty and allowing disadvantaged individuals to live the lives they value.” The bottom-up, communal, and hands-on cycling initiatives lay the grounds for more human-scale planning and policy needed for normalizing cycling for groups that traditionally face barriers to take up cycling ( 7 , 25 ).

Increasing scholarly attention has been paid to the concept of commoning mobility, and to speak about community initiatives and social movements as forms of social infrastructures ( 3 , 10 , 30 ). As Nikolaeva et al. ( 30 ) (p356) argue, “[c]ommoning mobility refers to projects that highlight the shared responsibility for what mobility does to societies and communities.” By emphasizing the importance of social infrastructures, cooperation, and mutual support, grassroot cycling initiatives contribute to realizing transport systems that better accommodate inexperienced cyclists, cyclists with different forms of care obligations or impaired mobility. By doing so, they make interventions into what Davidson ( 20 ) refers to as the conditions that configure the possibilities and experiences of cycling, namely those based on access to equipment, bodily capacities, confidence, whiteness, heteronormative, masculinity, and wealth. Conditions that cycling initiatives contribute to changing by configuring new possibilities for cycling and individuals’ ability to become cyclists. To unpack the diverse range of cyclist experiences, including the experiences of potential cyclists, provides policy makers with the necessary tools to “identify and overcome barriers to more inclusive and just planning” ( 48 ). Based on the findings of this study, a crucial step toward inclusive cycling involves listening to the demands of grassroots initiatives and addressing context-specific barriers to safe and inclusive cycling.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-trr-10.1177_03611981261429871 – Supplemental material for Commoning Cycling: Grassroot Initiatives for Inclusive Mobility Transitions Among People Facing Barriers to Cycling

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-trr-10.1177_03611981261429871 for Commoning Cycling: Grassroot Initiatives for Inclusive Mobility Transitions Among People Facing Barriers to Cycling by Dag Balkmar, Lina Sandström, Alina Esteves, Maria Lucinda Fonseca, Andrei Holman, Simona Popusoi and Francesca Pugliese in Transportation Research Record

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-2-trr-10.1177_03611981261429871 – Supplemental material for Commoning Cycling: Grassroot Initiatives for Inclusive Mobility Transitions Among People Facing Barriers to Cycling

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-2-trr-10.1177_03611981261429871 for Commoning Cycling: Grassroot Initiatives for Inclusive Mobility Transitions Among People Facing Barriers to Cycling by Dag Balkmar, Lina Sandström, Alina Esteves, Maria Lucinda Fonseca, Andrei Holman, Simona Popusoi and Francesca Pugliese in Transportation Research Record