Automobility, velomobility, and complete streets? Discursively analyzing the politics of complete street design guidelines in Ontario, Canada

Complete streets are a widely used planning concept that decenters cars and provides roadway and boulevard space to pedestrians, cyclists, and transit; often with the objective of accommodating road users of ‘all ages and abilities’. However, the inclusivity of complete streets has been recently called into question due to a disconnect between what is promised and what is realized. We argue that to understand this gap, the politics of mobility—including the ideologies, norms, and values—produced and reproduced within complete streets planning processes must first be understood. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of five complete streets design guidelines from Ontario, Canada, examining the plans for their relationality to automobility and velomobility, including the mobilities supported, places produced, and types of bodies and identities considered. In this, we found that complete streets reproduce ideologies of automobility through positioning sustainable transportation modes and the public space of streets as efficient and economically productive. Such entanglements to automobility can limit the potential of complete streets to meaningfully accommodate ‘all ages of abilities’. These findings suggest that understanding the positionality and politics of complete streets is essential in reaching their potential within a just mobilities future.