Women on wheels : a study of how women experience cycling in Oslo and how it is dealt with in planning

M-BYREG

English. This thesis aims to broaden the understanding of women cyclists’ experiences from Oslo, and to find out how these experiences are perceived and dealt with by the planning system. Based on theory on gendered mobilities, the thesis offers a qualitative study with interviews of female cyclists about their experiences of cycling in Oslo, interviews with bicycle planners about their perceptions of female cyclists’ preferences and needs, and analysis of strategy and policy documents related to bicycle planning in Oslo municipality.The experiences of the female cyclists were focused on the topics of cycling culture and incoherence in the bike lane network. The cyclists all had similar experiences of missing a common set of behavioural rules in the bike lanes, a perception shared by the bicycle planners. The cyclists were quite critical to the state of the bicycle infrastructure in Oslo, though several thought recent developments had greatly improved the cycling experience and that the cycling culture would improve with time and with more cyclists in the lanes. The bicycle planners recognised most of the challenges described by the cyclists, and as such, there does not appear to exist any dissonance to speak of between the planners and the cyclists. The interviews with the planners and the analysis of bicycle strategy documents both showed that the bicycle planning in Oslo, despite documentation of imbalanced gender ratios among cyclists and research-based advice, has made few, if any, measures targeted specifically at female cyclists. Rather, the policy has been to make Oslo a city that ‘everyone’ can enjoy cycling in. Coherent with the body of existing literature on gendered mobilities, the results of the thesis suggest that bicycle planning should put more emphasis on the preferences and experiences of underrepresented groups of cyclists.