E-micromobility, Cycling, and ‘Good’ Active Travel

Abstract

This article explores how e-micromobility (EMM) can produce 'good' active travel together with cycling. Foregrounding the unique affordances of the electric unicycle (EUC) and e-bike, we highlight their potential to produce good active travel with cycling through protected bike lanes and traffic-calmed neighbourhood greenways. We argue that electric unicycling and e-biking can create good active travel together with cycling by advancing multiple and competing visions of the common good or political philosophies of mutual flourishing. We imagine 'good' active travel as practices and infrastructures that equip a plurality of commons goods, based on industrial, market, civic, domestic and ecological worths, as well as challenge the hegemonies of automobility and market worth. Using mobile ethnographic data from Vancouver, our analysis shows that electric unicycling and e-biking can, through infrastructures shared with cycling, advance these common goods, including decolonizing extensions of domestic worth, while challenging the car and neoliberal capitalism. Ultimately, we conclude that 'good' futures for electric unicycling, e-biking and cycling demand mobility justice through a consolidation of their decolonizing, civi and ecological worths at the expense of their industrial and market worths.