![Sample our Urban Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110826/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Urban-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
During the last 15 years an increasing number of presidents, prime ministers, governors and mayors in developed and developing countries have been riding bicycles to promote a more sustainable and friendly form of urban mobility. We believe that these images also reveal and influence the image of contemporary urban mobility – the way in which people see what urban mobility is and how it should be. In this paper we discuss how the image of the bicycle has changed in Brazil and how this may influence an increase in its actual 1% bicycle modal share in big cities. We conclude that the importance of the bicycle in the image of urban mobility has been changing cyclically, and what seems to be a positive trend today might end up as being just an ephemeral positive image, with the risk of having no further practical consequences.
Acknowledgement
The authors thank two anonymous referees and the editor for their helpful suggestions on improving the original version of the article.
Notes
1. A search for politicians + bicycle on Google images shows politicians promoting and riding bicycles, including the Mayor of Copenhagen and the US President (1993), the Mayor of London and the Governor of California (2011), the Mayor of Paris (2008), the Governor of Rio de Janeiro (2008), the Mayor of São Paulo (2012), the Mayor of Bogotá (2010), the Mayor of New York (2012), the Mayor of Curitiba (2013).
2. The quotation continues: ‘… and readers recommended “Bicyclists ought to have roads to themselves, like railway trains”…’ (Thompson as cited in Bijker, Citation1995, p. 41). This is interestingly contemporary, but beyond the scope of this paper.
3. This was published in a newspaper in Curitiba, at that time a city with fewer than 400,000 inhabitants.
4. The map of the bike stations can be found at http://www.movesamba.com.br/bikerio/