Abstract
As policy makers grapple with rapid motorization processes, cycling facilities are gaining new urgency, offering non-polluting and affordable alternatives to automobility. At the same time, urban sustainability paradigms tend to focus on purely technical solutions to transportation challenges, leaving questions of history and social power aside. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Aguascalientes Mexico, this article contributes to the transportation and mobility justice literature by focusing on the work of social movements in confronting a variety of challenges in the provision of active-transportation services. First, this research explores how social movements express and negotiate transportation-justice concerns to government and planning authorities. Next, I build on the concept of insurgent citizenship to highlight the processes through which residents contest ongoing injustices and formulate alternatives for building inclusive cities. From the creation of makeshift cycling lanes in underserved urban areas to the search for socially just alternative to policing, social movements are forging new pathways to re-envision sustainable transportation systems. These insurgent forms of citymaking—understood here as insurgent mobilities—underscore the creative role of citizens in producing the city as well as the enormous amount of care work involved in these processes.
Highlights
Researchers explain that the number of traffic fatalities is likely much higher than officially reported given that pedestrians and cyclists who die in ambulances and in hospitals in Mexico often become “garbage data” in official reports and are not included in the statistics on traffic fatalities: “This study shows that the actual burden of road traffic mortality in Mexico as reported by nationally collected data is underestimated by 27 to 34 percent due to inappropriate and nonspecific ICD-10 coding of deaths
Sustainability has been proposed as a necessary shift for transport planning, stressing the importance of social, environmental, and economic transformations [97]
This article has elaborated on these debates, beginning with the paradoxical case of Ciclovía Gómez Morín—an infrastructure that has received a disproportionate amount of investment at the same times as it has experienced an uneven level of deterioration and insecurity
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In March 2018, I joined a group of bicycle advocates in Aguascalientes, Mexico in an impromptu meeting regarding a series of lighting disappearances on one of the city’s principal cycling facilities: Ciclovía Gómez Morín (Figures 1 and 2)—a bicycle–pedestrian path on the outer-eastern edge of the city center. A long-time bicyclist in the city, discussed a devasting mugging that he experienced on this facility at night, which left him seriously injured and bikeless for several months. A leader in the bicycle movement, reminded us that these issues have been challenging for women commuters amidst a rising crisis of gender-based violence: “We have to worry about who might be lurking in the bushes,” she explained, so “sometimes I’d rather take the risk and ride out in the street with the cars instead of riding on the dark path.”.
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