How Environment Shapes Mobility: Infrastructure & Urban Form
Urban Cycling Institute intern, Ingrid Sant, explores key themes in peer-reviewed literature and what the research tells us about building more liveable and just cities
Cycling is one of the simplest, most elegant solutions for more equitable and climate-resilient urban ecosystems. Fewer people in personal vehicles means lower carbon emissions, cleaner air, quieter city streets, and better access to public spaces. A previous Substack article also explored the measurable benefits cycling offers for human physical, mental, and social well-being by promoting more active lifestyles and increasing opportunities for social connection and community.
However, not everyone experiences these benefits equally. In our contemporary, car-centric world, active travel—here referring to walking and cycling—is decreasing globally, and who can enjoy safe, active, and independent mobility in an urban context is often a matter of social privilege (Antón-González et al., 2026).
Many academic studies have explored the complex interplay of environment, infrastructure, and identity in shaping urban mobility decisions. At the same time, recent articles from the Urban Cycling Institute reveal the shortcomings of peer-reviewed research, both in terms of inequitable knowledge production and the failure to mobilize findings into tangible and lasting systems change.
Often published in siloed echo chambers or behind prohibitive paywalls, traditional scientific research risks merely “preaching to the choir” if it is not actually used to inform policy and practice. To help bridge the gap between academic literature and implementation, this three-part series translates and synthesizes recent research in sustainable active mobility with the goal of reaching planners, practitioners, policymakers, and communities. Within three primary themes from the literature, the series explores key barriers and opportunities for urban cycling and shares actionable takeaways to advance healthier, more liveable, and more equitable cities for the future.
Theme 1: The Built Environment
Among three emergent themes from the literature, I begin with perhaps the most obvious: the physical and material conditions of our environments. Findings within this theme centre around the question: how do the contours of the urban landscape shape how we live, move, and feel in our cities?
Let’s imagine a parent’s daily school drop-off commute. If cycling, this parent might look for narrower, residential streets, away from the noise and smog of heavy traffic arteries. By carefully selecting a route that is protected from the elements—perhaps interspersed with shady greenery, bodies of water, and urban design features—they’ll provide a safe, pleasant, and enriching travel experience for themself and their child. In the absence of such a route, however, they may opt to drive or take public transit instead.
This example illustrates how local conditions moderate mobility decisions, a relationship that has been extensively explored across urban sustainable mobility literature. By and large, the research shows that cyclists prioritize routes that balance travel efficiency, safety, comfort, and aesthetic enjoyment (Lu et al., 2025). Factors like directness, proximity, terrain, land-use mix, urban density, traffic volume, building height, and the presence of neighborhood commercial and recreational facilities all play a crucial role in enabling or deterring cycling in cities (Ding et al., 2025; Zhu et al., 2026).
Cycling as Embodied Experience
Going beyond the macro-level focus on structural accessibility and connectivity, researchers are increasingly working to understand decisions made on the micro-scale, exploring cycling as a situated experience that unfolds within individual bodies at the street level (Ding et al., 2025). Unlike those traveling in enclosed motorized transport like cars and buses, cyclists are exposed directly to the textures, frictions, and tensions of the road, and therefore are especially sensitive to the material and perceptual qualities of the urban streetscape.
Cyclists and pedestrians alike demonstrate a preference for streets that are more open, continuous, and green (Lu et al., 2025). Environmental exposures like air quality, climate, precipitation, wind, and noise pollution also directly impact the comfort and viability of cycling; in fact, studies show that cyclists will deviate from the most direct route for more favorable environmental conditions.
Bike-Positive Infrastructure
While conditions like hilliness, weather, sprawl, and compact historic urban fabrics pose distinctive challenges for urban cycling, environmental factors alone do not determine cycling viability. (Ding et al., 2025). Rather, the research shows that, above all other factors, travel choices are determined by the infrastructure that is available to us (Antón-González et al., 2026).
Returning to our example of the parents’ school commute, we can see how layering additional built environment elements like dedicated cycling lanes separated from vehicle traffic, well-maintained surfaces, clearly marked intersections and crossings, large radius curves, interspersed benches for rest, and secure bike parking might help encourage cycling over other modes—by increasing the ease and comfort of the journey.
Further, recent research from Prado et al. (2026) used mobile ethnographic methods—where participants video-record their journey and later talk through their experiences while watching the videos—to investigate how cycling infrastructure is experienced in motion. Specifically, they looked at the impact of continuity or a sense of “flow” in encouraging or deterring cycling. While cycling infrastructure may be technically available, a cyclist’s experience of inconsistency or obstructions fragments the sense of continuity and diminishes the ease and enjoyment of the ride. Examples of obstructions include excessively narrow lanes, physical barriers, inadequate or unclear signage, or a lack of cycling facilities.
Infrastructure provision must go beyond simply connecting A to B, providing robust, interconnected infrastructure networks rather than isolated interventions.
Towards More Hospitable Urban Ecosystems
The research makes clear that the material conditions of our environments play a crucial role in fostering urban cycling cultures. Infrastructure directly shapes travel behavior, and the availability of smooth, pleasant, green, and well-connected cycling networks matters more than route directness or efficiency.
Recent articles have illustrated how cities from Davis, California to Bologna, Italy are working to transform once car-dominated streetscapes into thriving urban ecologies teeming with two-wheeled life: by building protected cycle lanes and bike parking infrastructure, implementing creative civil-society bike sharing systems, expanding public transit networks, and integrating intentional urban design, among other interventions.
Yet cycling is not merely a matter of infrastructure provision, and policies that only take into consideration built factors may fall short of achieving their most ambitious sustainability targets—or meeting the needs of their communities. The success of infrastructural interventions is inherently context-specific and must be grounded in the understanding that mobility is shaped as much by social structures as it is by material ones.
The remaining articles in this series will explore how social perceptions and demographic identity factors play into both access and experience in the context of urban sustainable and active mobility. Stay tuned!
This article was written by Ingrid Sant and is the first installment in a three-part series exploring barriers and opportunities for urban cycling as represented in contemporary academic literature. The next article will investigate the role of social perceptions in cycling practice. Sign up to our newsletter to receive the remaining articles in your inbox.
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References
Antón-González, L., Villarrasa-Sapiña, I., González, L.-M., & Devís-Devís, J. (2026). Urban cycling: A non-linear analysis of transport amenities and socio-demographic and health variables. Journal of Transport Geography, 131, 104559. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2026.104559
Ding, H., Wang, C., & Gath-Morad, M. (2025). How built environment shapes cycling experience: A multi-scale review in historical urban contexts. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.15657
Glaser, M. (2025, November 3). How Prioritizing the Car Has Shaped What Knowledge Matters and Whose Knowledge Counts (Substack). Urban Cycling Institute. https://urbancyclinginstitute.substack.com/p/how-prioritizing-the-car-has-shaped
Grasso, M. (2026, March 24). Bologna: The Italian City Rewriting Urban Planning (Substack). Urban Cycling Institute. https://urbancyclinginstitute.substack.com/p/bologna-the-italian-city-rewriting
Leeuwen, N. van. (2025, May 7). Cycling as Public Health: How Pedal Power Can Transform Our Cities and Our Lives (Substack). Urban Cycling Institute. https://urbancyclinginstitute.substack.com/p/cycling-and-public-health
Lu, C., Piatkowski, D., Östh, J., Kourtit, K., & Nijkamp, P. (2025). Modeling the impact of street-level built environment on cyclists’ route choice using street view images and GPS data. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 23998083251405122. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083251405122
Power, D. (2026, March 12). Is It Time to Rethink Evidence-Based Cycling Policy? (Substack). Urban Cycling Institute. https://urbancyclinginstitute.substack.com/p/is-it-time-to-rethink-evidence-based
Prado, G., Strömberg, H., & Wallgren, P. (2026). Impact of cycling infrastructure on cyclists experience and sense of flow in two cities. Discover Cities, 3(1), 46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00218-y
Raclet, L. (2025, January 29). Davis, The American Amsterdam: A Pioneering Cycling Town In Northern California (Substack). Urban Cycling Institute. https://urbancyclinginstitute.substack.com/p/davis-the-american-amsterdam-a-pioneering
Zhang, R. (2025, December 19). Comparative Research in Mobility: Reject Copy-Paste Design, Embrace the Peace and Joy of the Ride (Substack). Urban Cycling Institute. https://urbancyclinginstitute.substack.com/p/comparative-research-in-mobility
Zhu, Y., Qin, X., Wu, R., & Zhen, F. (2026). How is commute mode choice related to 2D and 3D land use mix? A case study of central Suqian City. Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, 14(1), 2622498. https://doi.org/10.1080/21680566.2026.2622498
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Thanks for the article, I really enjoyed it. I found interesting the idea that cyclists might deviate to find a better route, I was wondering if cyclist tend to use more different routes than walking since they can cover more distance. That could make the everyday a but different.