May 2012 Street Talks Judy Green, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Identity and the city – what your choice of transport says about you Brought to you by Movement for Liveable London - movementforliveablelondon.com

1. Identity and the city: what does your
choice of transport say about you?
Judith Green LSHTM
Transport & Health Group

2. Acknowledgements
• This presentation draws on work of LSHTM’s
Transport & Health group, including Rebecca
Steinbach, Alasdair Jones, Phil Edwards, Anna
Goodman
• Funders include: NIHR Public Health Research
(grant number 09/3001/13), NHS
Camden, Transport for London
• The views and opinions expressed in this talk are
those of the presenter, and do not necessarily
reflect those of the Department of Health, other
funders or colleagues.

3. AN EXAMPLE: CHANGING CULTURAL
CONNOTATIONS OF CYCLING

4. Ralph Glasser
on riding to
Oxford from
Glasgow
I wheeled the bike out of our flat on the
third, top floor of the Gorbals tenement, and
leaned it against the iron stairhead railing… I
would carry the bike down the winding stairs
and ride away, further than I had ever
travelled, to take up the scholarship …

5. I was glad it was in the dark, the
sense of magic, of freedom, of
taking wing, heightened …
R. Glasser ‘Gorbals Boy at Oxford’ 1990:48

6. I mean to be fair it does
make me feel smug, my
friends joke that it’s very
middle class and they joke
that it sort of fits in with
the lifestyle of gardening,
listening to Radio 4, eating
organic food and cycling … it makes me feel smug
in the sense that I’m doing something that’s not
hurting the environment, ‘oh I’m so good I’m
cycling, I’m being fit and I’m not hurting the
environment’… so yeah I do feel smug thinking,
I’m cycling to work, I’m not going to get fat’
(‘Charlotte’, London 2009)

7. [ I see] white men between the ages of
25 and 35, and there aren’t that many
women
(Charlotte)

8. Per cent of people who made at least
one trip by bicycle (London, 2005-7)
Ethnicity* Men Women
‘White’ 3.6 1.6
‘Black’ 1.4 0.2
‘Asian’ 0.9 0.0
Other 2.3 0.5
All 3.0 1.2
Source: Transport for London, LTDS 2005-7
*Aggregated from census self-report UK census categories

9. TRANSPORT CHOICES INFLUENCED BY
AVAILABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY

10. Percent of households with no car and
Number of trips per person per year, by income quintile
(Source: National Travel Survey 2010, DfT)
1 2 3 4 5
Lowest Highest
%with no car/van: 49 38 18 12 9
Trips per person by:
Walking 267 205 195 199 185
Cycling 10 14 16 18 15
Car driver 223 321 426 491 550
Bus 111 90 61 51 29

11. Percent of households with no car and
Number of trips per person per year, by income quintile
(Source: National Travel Survey 2010, DfT)
1 2 3 4 5
Lowest Highest
%with no car/van: 49 38 18 12 9
Trips per person by:
Walking 267 205 195 199 185
Cycling 10 14 16 18 15
Car driver 223 321 426 491 550
Bus 111 90 61 51 29

12. TRANSPORT CHOICES ALSO
INFLUENCED BY CULTURAL MEANING

13. Black Londoners on the meaning of
cycling
• ‘So basically, it’s people can’t afford to drive that
actually will cycle … I can recall even walking, for
example, and having people from my community
saying “Why are you walking?” (Lester)
• ‘When you’ve made it, you buy a car not a
bicycle‘ (Leanne)
• ‘*people I do see on bikes+ won’t be in Lycra,
haring across town to a meeting… They’d be guys
on the little bikes, the fun bikes’ (Marvin)
• ‘It’s not like the cultural thing for the Black
minority people to be cycling’ (Nicole)

14. Where I come from, bikes are part of boys’
gang culture, but not part of getting around
In *‘Mini-Amsterdam’ + you can see every
model, every colour, it’s like saying ‘I’m
environmentally friendly, but I can afford to
pimp my bike’ (Carla)

15. ‘ Bike Porn’: comments on blog
‘That f***in stem is horrible…’
‘Very well proportioned
though, I wouldn’t have
known it was a 650’
‘stem is horrible, spacer stack
both above and below stem,
why is the head tube not
Source: ‘Bike porn’ from London
fixed gear and single speed
longer are the horse frames
forums not custom made?’
http://www.lfgss.com/thread29
-1136.html

16. GENDERED MEANINGS

19. What’s important about cycling?
Independence, so I don’t know you’re never
going to be, well you can get a puncture but if
you know how to change a puncture then
you’re pretty independent and you don’t have
to rely on tubes running or buses not breaking
down or tube strikes or whatever. You don’t
have to go anywhere the buses go so, it’s
flexible, it’s transport from your origin to your
destination (Hannah)

20. one of the girls in my office, her
boyfriend is afraid of, he sort of is
moderately controlling and doesn’t want
her cycling because he’s worried about
her but there are two of us who do cycle
in the office and we think it’s completely
ridiculous and silly, but we’re also the
sort of the kind of people who wouldn’t
ever let anyone tell us what to do’.
(Julia, emphasis added)

21. Men on pleasures of cycle commuting:
speed, enjoyment of risk
• It’s a bit of adrenalin; it’s good for a moment… I
won’t have people just cutting me up…I might
consider myself a bit of an urban warrior on bike
(Russ)
• I think a lot of the time I'm cutting cars up rather
than the cars cutting me up. (William)
• I generally cycle at or faster than the speed of the
car, on the open road I’ll do 30mph on the flat
and away from traffic lights I’m a lot faster than
most! (Fred)

22. Women on the need to be ‘assertive’
• I don’t think cycling is dangerous, I think that’s
an excuse *not to cycle+ … I think it’s just about
being assertive (Molly)
• I try to be assertive when I’m cycling… I really
try to be assertive and confident (Kelly)

23. Risks of cycling in London can be:
• Welcomed – part of display of particular kinds of
(usually masculine) identity
• Managed – through careful deployment of
assertive, independent (usually female) identity
• Eliminated by not cycling
– Risks are not only physically threatening, but also
morally, through the ‘aggression’ needed to cope:
‘you can tell they are cycling commuters because
you can see in their faces they’ve gone from
feeling vulnerable to being aggressive to other
people’ (Abigail)

24. Does anyone here cycle …?
Shila: So if you’re using the bicycle, what about the
children? How are you going to bring them to
school? You have, ride the bicycle, and where are
the kids? [all laugh] Where do you put them?
So, that’s not a good idea!
Deepa: And another thing is that, because everyone
lives in a flat, and there’s not enough space, so
where would you put your bike?
Anjali: And it’s not useful for us because we, if we
wear a jilbab, how are we going to ride a bike?

25. UNIVERSAL FARE EXEMPTIONS AND
THE ‘NORMALISATION’ OF BUS TRAVEL

26. ‘Freedom passes’ and ‘Zip cards’
• Freedom Pass available to all over 65: entitles
user to free bus, tram, tube travel at all times
• ‘Zip’: free travel for under 16s introduced in
2005; extended to under 18s in 2006
• Scheme intended to:
Help young people to continue stuyding, improve
employment prospects and promote the use of
public transport (TfL 2006)

27. Buses – summary of issues in literature
• Research review:
– buses used
disproportionately by
low income and older
people
– Disliked as ‘mode of last
resort’
– Public buses seen as
inconvenient, slow, dirty
– Older people report loss
of driving a significant
blow to identity

28. Older people’s views in London
‘Take it away and there’d be blood on the streets’
• Bus pass widely seen as huge benefit:
– ‘lifeline’ to participation
– ‘lifestyle’ for many of social interaction
– contact with wide range of people
‘It’s a godsend… it’s very lonely where I am … I’d be lost
without it, it’s the only thing that gets you around’
‘It’s made a world of difference to me, or I’d be stuck
indoors’
• Few missed driving

29. Young people’s bus use
• Young people often prefer to travel with friends
• Zip made bus default travel option – because all can use it,
all did
• No stigma attached to bus use
• See a range of other Londoners using bus
It [Zip Card ]...makes you feel proud [to be a Londoner]
because you’re at the front of everyone, because you’re the
ones who have brought in these new schemes that are
working and making your life easier...
And also you have this mutual understanding of [being...] a
Londoner, you’re the same as me now. there’s…this sense
of community in this huge, huge [city.]

30. • I must admit I took my freedom pass out of its
freedom pass holder [starts laughing] and put it
onto something else!
• I must confess that, because I do have trouble
walking and do get very tired sometimes, I do use
my car sometimes. But a lot of people can’t
afford to do that, especially now, and Freedom
Passes are becoming more and more important.

31. Travelling on ‘public’ transport
does entail conflicts between
different users – over
entitlements to use space,
seats, appropriate behaviour, as
evidenced by campaigns to
shape shared expectations

32. Implications for transport choices
• The car’s symbolic
associations with freedom
and independence (as noted
by Glasser) have been
fractured in London
• Cycling comes to represent
the ‘new’ independence (for
a few)
• Public transport
‘destigmatised’ by
universality and
normalisation

33. References: cycling
Green J, Steinbach R, Datta J and Edwards P. (2010) Cycling in
London: a study of social and cultural factors in transport
mode choice. A report to the Smarter Travel Unit, TfL.
London: LSHTM
Steinbach R, Green J, Datta J, and Edwards P. (2011) Cycling
and the city: a case study of how gendered, ethnic and class
identities can shape healthy transport choices Social
Science and Medicine 72: 1123-1130
Green J, Steinbach R and Datta J. (2012) The travelling citizen:
emergent discourses of moral mobility in a study of cycling
in London Sociology 46: 272-289

34. References: buses
• Jones A, Steinbach R, Roberts H, Goodman A
and Green J. (2012) Rethinking passive
transport: bus fare exemptions and young
people’s wellbeing Health and Place 18: 605-
612
• ‘On the buses’ study website
http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/php/hsrp/buses/inde
x.html