ABSTRACT
Urban planners half-jokingly say that the most powerful urban planners in Bergen are its seven mountains. This city on Norway’s western coast boasts high electric vehicle adoption and is building out car-free zones in central and suburban areas to achieve ambitious low-carbon mobility targets by 2030. Yet, these measures require urban interventions that are accompanied by a political backlash, most prominently through resistance to tolls. Urban planners face a dual challenge: to rapidly decarbonise mobility and legitimate these measures to diverse, unequivocal publics. Whereas plans prioritise public and non-motorised mobility solutions, the most organised stakeholders are car users. This study draws on small-scale surveys with both public transport users and car drivers. Survey results capture imaginaries among diverse publics. How do these publics engage with Bergen’s mobility transition? Ethnographic insights complement these results, including expert interviews with diverse stakeholders and focus groups with transport users. On this basis, the chapter argues that while partly conditioned by urban geography, Bergen’s mobility transition is mainly influenced by divergent socio-technical imaginaries of mobility among its commuting publics. Planners must explicitly address these mobility transition politics. They must change the embodied routines of transition planning and implementation to cohere around enabling socially inclusive mobility futures.
