Planning for cycling: examining planners’ attitudes towards the cycling potential of their city

Abstract

The potential of cycling for a sustainable city development has been widely recognised nowadays. However, as noticed in many of the studies on cycling behaviour, seeing the bicycle as an essential transport mode for the development of the city is not a universal belief. In that way, cycling is still neglected in urban transport planning in some cities, or ‘starter cycling cities’, where they can be found behind in promoting the mode, depicted in their residual cycling share and poor conditions offered. One such challenge is to anticipate a starting point for the future development towards soft transport modes instead of expecting an external after-effect. In response to that, policy makers and planner practitioners need to engage in implementing efficient pro-bike transport policies.Understanding that a resistance to the adoption of cycling solutions can be presented by individuals, as well as policymakers and planning practitioners, this research aims at building a conceptual method able to identify an attitude change of urban planners towards the cycling potential of their city under mediators of change techniques that in this case attempts to create awareness on the potential for cycling of a starter cycling city.Shaped on the Transtheoretical Model of Change and the principles of attitude change, professional attitudes towards cycling were assessed through belief-based surveys and classified into the following stages of change profiles: resistant, sceptic, interested, enthusiastic, and committed. For the application of the method, we involved a number of local practitioners from two Portuguese starter cycling cities in a series of workshops. Attitudinal surveys were implemented prior to the first workshop and after the last one. The method showed significant potential in assessing attitude change, when we found that previous attitudes corresponded to the expectations and that over half of planners involved showed more positive attitudes towards cycling after the workshops.