Cycling for net zero transition: diversity, infrastructures and care

In this article, we examine the role of care in enabling and sustaining people’s engagement with cycling-as-transport for net zero transitions. In doing so, we argue that care might be considered a kind of affective and practical infrastructure which supports cycling and consequently can support ambitions for transition to net zero. While physical and material cycling infrastructures such as cycle lanes and pathways contribute many elements that make cycling possible, we suggest greater attention to the value of care, and how it is performed and articulated through cycling, is needed. Recognising care – for the self, others and the environment – as underpinning and sustaining cycling draws our attention to the gaps, breakages and limitations of material infrastructures, and shows how caring is embedded in the improvisatory and creative ways in which people sustain or abandon cycling when infrastructures fail them. To develop our argument, we draw on ‘walking with video’ research encounters undertaken in a University Campus Net Zero Precinct which was already shaped by an institutional commitment to net zero transition.