Not Another Bike Lane Rant
There’s a frustrating familiarity to most conversations about cycling. You know the script; more bike lanes, protected intersections, integration with transit and the battle against cars. Not that these conversations aren’t technically sound and spiritually well natured, it’s just they usually fall flat for the emotions of anyone who hasn’t ridden a bike in the past week. All while irritating people who drive a car, or have had a cycling skip over a pedestrian crossing lately.
This was not one of those conversations, so you should keep reading or click play above.
Michela Grasso might live in the Netherlands, but she’s also Italian and was chatting to me from the Alps. They have hills there. This is important. She's part of the Urban Cycling Institute in Amsterdam, and does a lot of research work with the ageing population in the planned commuter city of Almere (which I bet most people haven’t heard of, let alone been to). It means she’s got this blended perspective from the realities of her home country, where cycling is still often seen by many as either a sport for men in Lycra or a relic of the pre-car era. Her work doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes of infrastructure, advocacy or policy. It’s messier and more interesting than that, focused on how cycling becomes a tool not just for transport, but for joy, dignity and social connection.
It’s less about what she studied, and more about what she notices. Michela is the kind of urbanist who’ll happily admit she cycles when the weather’s nice and takes the metro when it’s not. She doesn’t own a car but also doesn’t evangelise about it, and she’s honest about needing her mum to come pick her up from the station the other day. I like how Michela is realistic about the friction points in cities, and unwilling to pretend that if we just had the right number of bollards or the perfect Copenhagen graph, we’d win the war … because it shouldn’t be one in the first place.
We even talk about the stereotype of cycling in Italy being something like the Giro d’Italia, or the other end of the spectrum as she tells me about an Italian tv show of a bike priest solving crimes.
I think there are a lot of misconception about cycling in general. And personally, while working, for example, with the 15 minute city, I also realised that I don't like so much these very urban design terms because I think they can be quite limiting in the development of actual urban design.”
She’s drawn more to the context, and the edge cases, the lived and often contradictory reality of trying to get people moving in places not built for movement.
A Manifesto Built from the Margins
At the centre of that thinking is something quite remarkable - the Manifesto for Urban Cycling Futures - she co-authored with the Institute. Unlike most cycling advocacy documents, which tend to alternate between technical diagrams and a dose moral scolding, this one opens with something more subversive; play.
The manifesto is structured around six narratives, each reframing urban cycling through a human lens. Mobility as Play, Mobility as Social Interaction, Mobility as Commons, Mobility as Unnecessary, Mobility as South-North Nexus and Mobility as Political
“We wanted to go beyond that [calling for more bike lanes]. We wanted to create a framework that everyone could understand... to give guidelines on how to approach urban cycling, but also to have a way for people to understand why urban cycling is so important for cities.”
What’s brilliant about this approach is how unapologetically it centres emotion and culture, accepting there is a fair amount of complexity in how these things work. Take the inclusion of the Global South–North narrative. That wasn’t a given. It emerged through the participatory process of the manifesto’s development, workshops with a diverse, international alumni cohort who had spent time at the Institute. People like an LA mayoral policy advisor, a World Bank specialist in Peru and a grassroots organiser from Lyon. They were sharing how cycling plays out differently when filtered through race, class, culture, and memory.
Michela was surprised, and moved, that the South–North framing made it in. “We chose to put this mobility as a South–North nexus in the manifesto as a narrative. So to discuss about, you know, post-colonialism and the implication of power imbalances in urban cycling. And that was a pleasant surprise for me... There is much talk about this, but very rarely it's taken into account in policy rooms. So it was great to see someone from our group pushing that and taking the lead.”
While much of the urbanism world can get caught up in policy or technical debates such as whether a 2.2 metre bike lane is better than a 1.8 metre one (short answer, yes, but it depends), Michela and her peers have been reframing the conversation. What if we designed not for the average commuter, but for citizens that exist at the margins? What if a bike lane wasn’t just a corridor of movement, but a stage for family bonding, social spontaneity or moments of shared confidence?
Her research backs it. In Almere, where she’s spent the past year exploring how the so-called 15-minute city works, or doesn’t, for elderly residents, she found a recurring insight that should give any planner pause. The proximity was there, the services were close and the infrastructure was technically sound. But people weren’t walking or cycling so much, staying inside or feeling reliant on driving more. Because they had limited places to sit.
“If there’s no bench halfway, elderly people don’t walk,” she told me. “They stay inside. They lose their independence.”
It’s such a small thing, yet it captures everything wrong with rationalist urban planning. Typically for linear movement, and assuming able bodies. We forget that walking includes resting, whether you’re 80 or 28 and carrying a heavy load of shopping. For many people, especially older adults, the choice to go outside isn’t just about distance to be covered, but maintaining dignity.
Holding Hands and Singing Through the Streets
What makes Michela’s perspective so refreshing is how it reconnects cycling with the everyday, emotional texture of life, far beyond the typical infrastructure culture. Her research, and her own observations, are full of moments that stick with you long after the policy papers fade.
She references Mama Agatha, a migrant woman in Amsterdam who teaches other migrant women, many of whom never learned to ride as children, how to cycle. It’s an act of inclusion, of confidence-building, of giving people permission to move through a city with ease. Michela admires it not just for its function, but for what it symbolises: “It’s really about creating connections and really including everyone in the conversation about how to cycle.”
Then there’s the visual poetry of Amsterdam’s wide cycle lanes where you’ll regularly seen couples cycling side by side, even holding hands. “It warms my heart,” she says. While we do strive for shared streets that work for all modes of transport, you also need infrastructure that lets people feel relaxed.
In Italy, there’s the glorious story of the singing cyclist of Bologna (also called Michela), a woman who pedals through the city, singing from her bicycle, sometimes followed by groups of university students requesting songs. It’s absurd, magical and somehow says more about cycling’s cultural power than any mobility strategy ever could.
None of these moments are part of a severe action plan, and they’d be laughed at it they were. But they’re precisely the kind of experiences that reveal what’s possible when cycling is designed not just as a way to get somewhere, but as something that makes being somewhere feel better.
There’s a deeply humanist undercurrent to everything Michela talks about. The manifesto is more provocation than abstract thinking. To me, it’s a reminder that most of our cities aren’t just poorly designed, but poorly imagined. That we shouldn’t always start design from the perspective of the typical able-bodied, healthy person, and instead do so from the fringes. So that might means older adults, kids, migrants, people with different needs, and as a byproduct, you get a city that works better for everyone.
We extend that same logic to the e-bike debate, a topic that most cycling advocates either ignore or treat as a threat. E-bikes, for Michela, are a transformative, and imperfect, technology. We can’t pretend they’re problem-free, but they can be liberating in ways we haven’t fully accounted for yet. “It's like an insane mobility aid and I saw it a lot in my research that elderly people really need e-bikes for their independence. It's a great tool.’ says Michela.
E-bikes come with additional social baggage to the cycling scene. In Amsterdam, the type of e-bike you ride can signal your class, your ethnicity, even your politics. Fat bikes are associated with second-generation migrant youth, and draw suspicion. Van Moofs, sleek and expensive, are the preferred mode of tech-adjacent young men. Cargo bikes often show up just before the rent goes up.
It’s a reminder that mobility isn’t just about how we move, it’s about who gets to move with ease, and who doesn’t.
Bologna, Bogotá and Policy That Doesn’t Wait
When I asked her about places doing this well, she didn’t cite the usual suspects. So we didn’t do Paris, or Copenhagen, even Amsterdam. Instead, she pointed to Bologna, a city that’s made huge strides simply by lowering the speed limit. “They started by making the whole city 30km/h,” she explained. “People were furious. Said it would never work. But a year later, they recorded zero pedestrian deaths.”
It’s proof that you can lead with policy, not tarmac. That you don’t need a billion-euro plan to make people safer. Sometimes, you just need political will and a bit of courage.
She also highlighted Bogotá, where streets are closed on weekends to allow for citywide social mingling across class lines, and Pontevedra, a small Spanish city that simply banned cars in its centre over a decade ago and hasn’t looked back.
And then there’s the personal touch. Michela is running a masterclass for Italian municipal leaders this fall. It’s deliberately designed for people who don’t normally get invited to international planning conferences. It’s taught in Italian, including site visits to places that feel culturally familiar and most importantly, it puts decision-makers into student mode.
“We’re giving them a chance to feel like students again,” she said. “They cycle to class. They ask questions. They’re not expected to have all the answers.”
There’s something radical about that, for most people in power rarely get the freedom to feel uncertain, to be curious and sit with a bit of discomfort. But if cities are going to change, the people who run them need space to unlearn a few things too.
Let the Kids Have a Go
As our conversation began to wind down, I asked Michela the question I pose to every guest: If she had a magic wand, and could change one thing about how we shape our cities—no limits, no constraints—what would she do?
She had an immediate, simple, joy-filled answer: “I’d let children plan the city.”
It’s the kind of response that sounds whimsical at first, like a charming thought experiment. But the more she talked, the more serious it became, rather than being about novelty. Children, after all, don’t filter the world through bureaucratic process or political compromise, or obsess over zoning overlays and parking minimums. They aren’t constrained by budget cycles or land ownership, they just draw what they want to see and imagine what would make them feel good, which might often be quite cheap to deliver on. They notice what’s missing, and they say out loud what grown ups allow to go unsaid out of awkwardness.
“Playgrounds are so often planned by adults, which to me makes no sense because they’re not the ones who are going to use them. And I love to see them when they draw and they draw their ideas. They’re always so creative.”
There’s something so subversive about that, because what she’s really arguing for isn’t childishness, but imagination. The kind of clarity that’s all too often designed out of our public spaces by layers of caution, regulation and adult pretence. Children know when a space feels fun, or boring, or scary. They know when it invites play, and when it pushes them to the margins. And they’re surprisingly consistent in their feedback, if we bother to ask.
It’s also a fitting bookend to everything we’d talked about. The manifesto, the benches, the migrant women learning to ride, the couple holding hands as they cycle through Amsterdam. What ties all of it together isn’t mobility, but something bigger, like freedom. The freedom to move at your own pace, to feel safe, seen and be part of something.
This is the radical bit really, imagination as much as investment and infrastructure The kind we’re taught to dismiss as delusional and end up repressing. Kids have it in abundance, if we rediscover that as grownups, we might just build the kind of cities we all want to live in (even if we don’t always say out loud we do).
To being Challengers.
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