{"title":"Driving as essential, cycling as conditional: how automobility is politically sustained in discourses of everyday mobility","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2325370","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Car-based automobility remains dominant across Europe despite the high energy requirements such a system embeds. This system is becoming increasingly problematised. As part of an alternative vision for everyday mobility, an aspiration for vélomobility appears to be growing. In light of the persistent subordinate status of cycling across much of Europe relative to driving, attempts to lay the foundations for everyday cycling are often pursued through the implementation of redistributive cycleways and broader public space measures that prioritise active travel. These important attempts to change public space can be blocked through public opposition, which can feature as part of broader social practices that may politically sustain automobility as a dominant system. In this study, we explore how automobility is politically sustained in discourses of opposition to a major active travel scheme proposal in the context of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Ireland. We uncover how a normatively car-centric <em>discourse of everyday mobility</em> constructs driving as the essential mobility practice for the functional tasks of everyday life, while cycling is relegated to recreational and conditional mobility, and briefly consider how an alternative discourse of everyday mobility that decentres the car may be advanced.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"19 4","pages":"Pages 789-805"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Mobilities","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S1745010124000262","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"GEOGRAPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Car-based automobility remains dominant across Europe despite the high energy requirements such a system embeds. This system is becoming increasingly problematised. As part of an alternative vision for everyday mobility, an aspiration for vélomobility appears to be growing. In light of the persistent subordinate status of cycling across much of Europe relative to driving, attempts to lay the foundations for everyday cycling are often pursued through the implementation of redistributive cycleways and broader public space measures that prioritise active travel. These important attempts to change public space can be blocked through public opposition, which can feature as part of broader social practices that may politically sustain automobility as a dominant system. In this study, we explore how automobility is politically sustained in discourses of opposition to a major active travel scheme proposal in the context of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Ireland. We uncover how a normatively car-centric discourse of everyday mobility constructs driving as the essential mobility practice for the functional tasks of everyday life, while cycling is relegated to recreational and conditional mobility, and briefly consider how an alternative discourse of everyday mobility that decentres the car may be advanced.
期刊介绍:
Mobilities examines both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private spaces, and the travel of material things in everyday life. Recent developments in transportation and communications infrastructures, along with new social and cultural practices of mobility, present new challenges for the coordination and governance of mobilities and for the protection of mobility rights and access. This has elicited many new research methods and theories relevant for understanding the connections between diverse mobilities and immobilities.