ABSTRACT
Questions of experience, difference and justice are central to a mobilities perspective yet despite the politics of mobility implicit in transition, the literature has yet to fully engage with these issues. Arguing that any future mobility systems and transition toward them must apprehend and accommodate a plurality of mobilities, this chapter seeks to foreground the intersection between diversely experienced socio-technical landscapes and the socio-technical regimes that make them (in)visible. Accordingly, the main focus of this chapter is to explore the importance of experiencing mobility and how it relates to methodological concerns.
In the first part of the chapter I discuss the ways in which narrow visions of mobility in service to urban economies have led to the privileging and facilitation of functional and efficient commuter mobilities to the neglect of othered mobilities. I then go on to illustrate, using the example of accessibility assessment, how these have become sedimented in standardising planning tools and methodologies. Following on from this, the chapter examines the ways in which the mobility experiences of children in particular have been marginalised in planning practice and resulting cycle design guidance. The chapter concludes with a call to challenge methodological anachronisms and the behavioural assumptions that perpetuate them if we are to shift our thinking to support sustainable and just transitions.
