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Understanding bicycle highways as a policy innovation
Huub Ploegmakers, Fariya Sharmeen
In many European countries, cycling has become an important mode/alternative for medium distance
commuting, mainly as a result of new technological opportunities (e-bike, smart communication).
Consequently, many cities and regions are expanding cycling networks, through the introduction of
bicycle highways. Local governments consider bicycle highways as an innovative and sustainable
alternative in commuter transport. In this paper, we will explore whether bicycle highways can be
actually considered a policy innovation. In doing so, we will peel the layers of innovation through the
process of diffusion in order to bring about change. We focus on two distinct, but as we will show,
strongly related processes that have been shown to be vital to policy innovation (see e.g. Jordan &
Huitema, 2014). The first process concerns the adoption of policy innovations and the way they diffuse
from one site to another. The second process relates to the effects that innovations produces on reality,
centring on the extent to which they promote substantial or radical change.
We draw on insights developed in science, technology and society (STS) to understand the movement
of technological innovations (Akrich et al., 2002a, 2002b; De Laet & Mol, 2000; Law & Mol, 2001)
and apply these to the field of policy making. These perspectives distinguish three forms in which
(technological) innovations might appear: as an object that holds its (physical) shape while it diffuses to
other locations, as an object that adapts to local circumstances and finally as an object that helps to bring
into being novel realities or reinforces existing ones. We present results from interviews with
professionals involved in the planning and implementation of bicycle highways in four different
countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, UK). This material has been supplemented with a review
of relevant policy of documents.
The first form in which an innovation might appear is that of an object that is relatively stable and
inflexible over time and across place. Viewed from this perspective, the speed of the innovation’s
diffusion can be explained by its intrinsic qualities, which have the same meaning and persuasion
everywhere. In this respect, Akrich et al. (2002a, 2002b) compare innovations to viruses that spread as
more users are persuaded by their infectious qualities. In the field of public policy as well, this virus
analogy is well rehearsed (see e.g. Richardson, 2000). For this to happen, the qualities of the innovation
have to become fixed and standardized. Only so, can potential adopters successfully evaluate the
advantages it offers compared to other goods or services. The question is whether bicycle highways
have gone through such a process. We will show which specific textual – even mathematical in Germany
- and material devices have been used to describe bicycle highways both in abstract and in more concrete
terms.
In the second form an technological innovation is object which is adaptable, flexible and responsive. In
this account, the presumed advantages of an innovation do not have the same meaning and power of
persuasion for all and in all places. Instead, successful adoption depends on the extent to which an
innovation can be adapted to the particular contexts in which it is to be inserted. As a result specific
alliances might be formed and particular interests mobilized in these sites, which can then act as
powerful spokespersons. We explore several alliances that were sought after and how in each of these
alliances bicycle highways were framed in different ways. This exploration will show that bicycle
highways are different objects depending on its context. In some sites, they become a car highway but
for bicycles, especially due to efforts to insert them in the ‘system of automobility’ (see e.g. Bruno,
2018). In other sites, they are transformed into an infrastructure improvement that generates all kinds of
economic costs and benefits. Yet, in other sites, bicycle highways are investments that help to improve
safety and quality of neighbourhoods. Bicycle highways are, thus, characterized by fluidity, shape
changing, and indeed name changing (as exemplified by the range of terms that have been used to
designated bicycle highways in the Netherlands). Crucially, difference does not exist in the rhetorics or
narratives used to describe bicycle highways alone, but in the practices in which bicycle highways are
enacted. These practices entail both discursive and material elements such as traffic models and cycling
data.
However, to explore whether bicycle highways can actually be considered an innovation – and to
evaluate their potential role in sustainability transitions – we may need to resort to yet another version
of what an object, and therefore an innovation, might be. Here we follow Law and Mol (2001) that argue
that any representation of an object depends on realities that are necessarily absent. For instance, all the
efforts needed to generate an estimate of modal shift or a cost-benefit ratio normally become obscured
in the process of producing them. And so are the realities built into the models used to produce these
figures. Travel time, for example, is conceived as a ‘bad’ and they also bring forward a reality in which
all transport modes, including public transport and cycling, should be solely judged against efficiency
criteria.
One might argue here that such absences demonstrate that bicycle highways have been ‘captured’ or
even co-opted by the system to which it sought to offer an alternative. This is undoubtedly true, but STS
studies have forcefully shown that it is not only objects that have to change in order for them to be
adopted, but also the contexts in which they are to be inserted. So, objects might also be transformative
and generative of new but absent realities. One way of looking at this, is by investigating the trajectories
through which objects acquire political capacities. In this respect, we will show that bicycle highways
follow different political trajectories in different sites. In some places they help to bring about new
concerned and unsettled ‘publics’ as they start to make use of bicycle highways. In other localities we
have seen how bicycle highways become part of more traditional forms of politics in which partisans
endorse the concept as part of broader strategies to make (inner) cities more cycling friendly. And then
there are sites, where bicycle highways have become implicated in a type of politics, often associated
with Foucault’s notion governmentality, in which practices of government have become ever more
technical. The alliance with the transport system and the practice of cost-benefit analysis can be regarded
as particular modes of governmentality. Bicycle highways are no longer seen to be ostensibly political
but as a form of routine administration to ‘solve’ particular problems. Simultaneously, we came across
sites in which bicycle highways actually helped to break down particular routine practices: for example
by making it more readily accepted to discuss priority for cyclists in traffic control.
References
Akrich, M., Callon, M., Latour, B., & Monaghan, A. (2002a). The key to success in innovation part I:
the art of interessement. International Journal of Innovation Management, 6(02), 187-206.
Akrich, M., Callon, M., Latour, B., & Monaghan, A. (2002b). The key to success in innovation part II:
The art of choosing good spokespersons. International Journal of Innovation Management,
6(2), 207-225.
De Laet, M., & Mol, A. (2000). The Zimbabwe bush pump: Mechanics of a fluid technology. Social
studies of science, 30(2), 225-263.
Jordan, A., & Huitema, D. (2014). Policy innovation in a changing climate: Sources, patterns and effects.
Global Environmental Change, 29, 387-394.
Law, J., & Mol, A. (2001). Situating technoscience: an inquiry into spatialities. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 19(5), 609-621.
Richardson, J. (2000). Government, interest groups and policy change. Political Studies, 48(5), 1006-
1025.
