Disability and Cycling

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is the Pulse. I've been visually impaired all my life. I've had what you could call a love-hate relationship with cycling. I might have already mentioned my very first bike. It was a yellow child-size equipped with training wheels. My parents wanted me to enjoy cycling much as they did as children and still do as a matter of fact. Sadly, it only took a couple close calls with distracted drivers on the residential streets of my neighbourhood for me to give up on cycling for a number of years. As an adult, though, I discovered tandem cycles, I realized I could enjoy the benefits of cycling without the very real fear of being run over by a car or cycling into an obstacle. I realized through my own experience that people with disabilities want to cycle and that the humble cycle is open to endless adaptations to accommodate a range of physical differences. Today we discuss disability and cycling. It's time to put your finger on the Pulse.
Hello and welcome to the Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta joining you from Accessible Media down in Toronto. And of course, as usual, I have my hair in a bun pulled away from my face, and I'm in a purple sweater, a dark purple with long sleeves and a crew neck. Today's show is really exciting for me because I've had, as I said in the opening essay, a bit of a love-hate relationship with cycling, and I was fascinated to learn that people had actually done research into cycling for people with disabilities. Why do people with disabilities cycle and what adaptations exist to allow as many people with disabilities as possible to enjoy cycling?
I have two guests today. Glen Norcliffe is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar in the Department of Geography at York University. Glen, hello and it's so good to have you on the program. 

Glen Norcliffe:
Good morning, Joeita.

Joeita Gupta:
Joining Glen today is Ron Buliung, who is a professor and graduate chair in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Ron, hello and welcome to you as well.

Ron Buliung:
Yeah, thanks so much Joeita, and thank you for the invitation. I'd just like to quickly add, Glen and I have been trying to get together for months and it's been impossible, so until your invitation.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, I'm glad we could facilitate a meeting. My first question may come as a very silly question, but I'm going to ask both of you in turn, how do a couple of geographers get interested in cycling? Glen, I'll start with you.

Glen Norcliffe:
Well, my route to this project is different from Ron's. I've been working for Europe for years on industry and became interested in the production of bicycles, most of which are made in China. And as time went on because of COVID, I couldn't go to China. I started looking at other aspects of cycling and it dawned on me that bicycles and disability are highly connected. The more I looked at it, the more I saw the potential, the cycling and disability.

Joeita Gupta:
What about you Ron, how did you get interested in this topic?

Ron Buliung:
Yeah. I mean I think my interest started around the age of three when I sat on my first tricycle. And then of course, fast-forwarding to a few years ago, I started to teach at a graduate seminar called the Historian Geography of Cycles and Cycling. I was actually inspired to do some of that work having read Glen's book, the Ride to Modernity, but my interest in the intersection of disability ableism and cycling comes from personal experience. So my youngest daughter is clinically labelled as having spinal muscular atrophy and we have a lot of disabling experiences with institutions, the city-built environment and so on.
And as an avid cyclist, I am still a passionate mountain biker and road cyclist. I wanted to figure out how to bring us together around this passion that I have. So we started to look for ways to enable us to cycle as a family, which brought me into this idea of looking at re-imagining the cycling body and looking into the technologies that are available, not like to help us out, but also broader community more broadly. Yeah.

Joeita Gupta:
I know it's a lot of ground to cover, so maybe Ron you could start by describing a few and then Glen you could take over and describe the rest, but in the article that was published in the disability studies quarterly where you talk about cycling. You talk about different types of adaptive cycles for one of a better phrase. So what are some of the kinds of cycles that you were looking at in this article? Ron, I'll start with you.

Ron Buliung:
Well, I mean Glen has such a deep understanding of the history of cycling technology and I think a lot of the breadth of the technologies really came from his knowledge. I got interested in some niche technologies like off-road e-mountain biking and also cycle trailers. We have a white trailer IZO made in Canada. That's what we use with my daughter. And then also during the course of writing this article, we were actually partially living at Holland Bur View Children's Rehabilitation Hospital used. My daughter had had a procedure, and so just walking around the halls there, I started to notice adapted tricycles and I'd imagining what Glen might do in a situation like that I'd get down on my knees and look at for a label where was it manufactured, who was the manufacturer, and I think that may have brought one of the examples into the article.

Joeita Gupta:
Glen, I'm going to bring you in here. You are clearly the cycling expert here. What are some of the types of adaptive cycles that you talk about in the article?

Glen Norcliffe:
Well, perhaps I could start at the very beginning if I may. The bicycle of cycles were actually invented by a paraplegic thought maker in Germany in the 16 hundreds. As far as we know that was the first recorded cycle and it was a hand cycle. So being a paraplegic, he could sit, it was a tricycle and he took the mechanism that he was working with every day making wooden clocks, and he just scaled it up to a bicycle-sized machine or tricycle-sized machine and found that he could get around this little town of Altdorf on his cycle. He'd go visit his family, he was a Lutheran, he could go to the church and things like that. So he got mobility out of upscaling his clock mechanism to a tricycle.
So hand cycles are one of the main types of cycle for people of paraplegic and they've been particularly seen and used after major wars. Like the first of all war, a lot of people suffered from luggages. And I can remember as a child after the Second World War, hand cycles being are frequently seen on the streets because of leg injuries in the war. I think the most exciting developments recently without going into all the many types is what they call clip-ons. Some people are largely confined to wheelchairs being paraplegic, but the clip-on is a device that clips onto a wheelchair, lifts a little front wheels of the wheelchair off the ground, and you've got a hand cycle like a tricycle.
But with e-assist, because e-assist makes a big difference for people who have physical limitations, you can cover surprisingly big distances. And I interviewed a lady in London, England who'd come from central London to Brixton market, something like eight or 10 miles on her clip-on, and it was amazing what she could cover and she'd got roots through parks and bike route and so on to get there. So those are one or two of the types of bicycles, but there must be at least a dozen major types now we could identify.

Joeita Gupta:
Just out of curiosity, Ron, I know this is a passion project for you, but aside from the work that you and Glen and your co-authors have done, how much more research is there out there about the use of adaptive cycles by people with disabilities? Is this something that's been looked into in some depth or is there a lot of ground left to cover?

Ron Buliung:
Sadly, but somewhat unsurprisingly, I think we've been breaking some new ground here. I think part of it has to do with all cycling literature and planning literature that's very much rooted in normative ideas about bodies and what bodies can do. But I have found, in preparing for this interview, I started to look into bike share again, which is one of the things that actually brought me to this subject as well. I was curious about the possibilities of bike share for providing mobility to disabled persons. And there's one piece that's been written and published on this and there've been a couple of examples. There's the MoGo system in Detroit, Michigan. I think Portland did a pilot test. So I mean the literature is relatively limited, which is both troubling but also indicates an opportunity.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, I mean if you don't mind, I'm going to switch gears as it were just, and I'll stick with you Ron, because you mentioned again that you want to cycle with your daughter and it's something that you think about on a day-to-day basis as it impacts you as a family. There's been a lot of conversations taking place. Here in Toronto, certainly, and I dare say in other municipalities about bike lanes and biking infrastructure, and you mentioned bike share, which is cropping up in cities all over North America. In the middle of all of this conversation and dialogue and dare I say even a resurgent interest in cycling, how much attention is anybody paying to a disabled cyclist as someone for whom we should be planning infrastructure and putting things in place?

Ron Buliung:
So glad you asked this question actually, because it's something that troubles me. And I would say that there's been a fantastic critical mass of folks who for years have advocated for increased bicycle infrastructure, not only in the city of Toronto but in many other all major global cities. But I think a lot of that has again been done thinking about normative ideas about cycling bodies, but not just the cycling bodies, about other folks who might use the shared space at any particular moment in time. So there are design guidelines out there for planning bike lanes from the start with disability in mind. We've had some terrific difficulty in moments where we've needed to go somewhere and in our mobility van and my daughter has had to go against the vehicle, the vehicle flow in the vehicular right of way and then crossing across the bike lane to get to a curb cut instead of there being a curb cut adjacent the disabled parking spot, which is immediately adjacent the bike lane.
So there's a lot more work that needs to be done there. I think the example that I just talked through is probably best illustrated in other ways, but there's a lot of complexity there and we know that there's some tension between pedestrians and cyclists within these spaces. I think there's also the use of bike lanes by folks who are using powered mobility assist bikes and people who are in power wheelchairs, like my daughter, who from a legal perspective are actually considered pedestrians or she considers herself a pedestrian as well. So yeah, it's both a fascinating site of attention, but again, an opportunity for change.

Joeita Gupta:
Glen, if you think back to how people with disabilities have made use of the bicycle or just cycling in general, was this most often used as a form of rehabilitation and therapy? If someone was, as you mentioned, after the Second World War, helping veterans recover from injuries, was that the primary use of cycling or did people with disabilities in fact adapt cycling for themselves to achieve maybe other aims outside of therapeutic ends and rehabilitation?

Glen Norcliffe:
Well, let me answer that by backing up a little bit. You are asking about literature. There's actually quite a big literature on the therapeutic aspects of cycling, mostly lab experiments, medicalized approach to cycling. But what I've found is that there are groups like in London, England. I've met with a group called Wheels for Wellbeing, which is promoting and working with local councils and the central government too to promote cycling for people with disability. One of the amazing programs is evenly park London, and that's where they've collected now about 60 therapeutic and adaptive bicycles and up to 50, 60 people at a time are cycling around a running track and they limit them to an hour because there's so many people want to engage in this activity.
So if you provide the right environment, a safe environment, as of course the Danes and the Dutch have done by building cycle lanes 30, 40 years ahead of most other countries, then those safe places to ride. And I've read of people partially cited in Holland, being able to ride with the flow as it were in cycle lanes. The importance, as Ron has said, of having the right infrastructure is crucial.

Joeita Gupta:
That's a very good point. Glen, I'm going to stick with you in the article. You talk about the social construction of technology. For those of us who aren't academics, myself included, what does that mean?

Glen Norcliffe:
Well, to oversimplify the two interpretations of technology, one is great inventors invent everything. Social construction stresses that the users matter, that the people who are ultimate users. And that's where my work wants to go if I can hang in there for the next few years. It's on how people with disability contribute and have a major say in the types of adaptations made to cycles to make them usable for people with a wide range of disabilities. And just to add on to that, we have to remember that the greater percentage of people with disability are in the third world. And one of the things I want to do is I've selected Indonesia because I have a bit of a network there of people in cycling and cycling with disability to find out how in a country with low incomes, people are adapting developing technologies at low cost often by cannibalizing old bikes and welding bits and pieces together. But as far as they know, nobody's looked at this and it's very important.

Joeita Gupta:
I think it is too because I grew up in India and I think I've seen a lot of that where people have relied on cycles as a way to get around and it's inexpensive and people have shown a great deal of ingenuity in taking an old cycle and turning it into something else. Ron, what do you think is at play here? Is it manufacturers that are responding to the needs of cyclists with disabilities and putting out models that meet some of these needs? Or is it more akin to what Glen is describing where it's people with disabilities themselves that are taking the cycle and reinventing it to suit their needs?

Ron Buliung:
Well, I think in some measure it's all of those things. One of the challenges with, we'll call it adapted equipment, it's a supply and demand issue. Equipment costs are inordinately high in part because the market is relatively small. This is something that we experience with my daughter's mobility aids, but even though at the white trailer, which I think it was around $1,500 plus tax, I'm a little bit concerned about access to technology because of the retail end of things. Sorry. I just had something pop up on my screen. Yeah. And I think there's a need there and a growing awareness and interest. People need to ask a question, why wouldn't disabled people be interested in cycling? I mean I think that's the starting point. And then manufacturers to a degree are responding to market demand, but the margins are greater per unit because there's a smaller market in general. I don't know if I'm explaining that quite well, but-

Joeita Gupta:
No, you're making a lot of sense. In fact, I'll even go so far as to say that you're reading my mind because I was going to talk to you about how each of these specialized bikes can cost a pretty penny. I think I mentioned that I joined a tandem cycling club and each of those tandem bikes is ruinously expensive. It's certainly outside the reach of an individual person to buy one on a whim, it's tens of thousands of dollars. Ron, what thoughts do you have about reducing the price tag? Is this somewhere that government can get involved and subsidize the cost of some of these cycles? Because right now, as far as I understand, it's left up to the family to shoulder those costs or you pull your resources and you join a tandem cycling club the way I did, but you don't really get to own your bike.

Ron Buliung:
Yeah. I mean I think fiscal policy could play a small role. I mean the disability tax credit hasn't changed in the 12 years that we've been accessing it. And I'm not even sure we could ply the cost of adaptive cycling technology against income in that context, but in order to do that, you have to have income in the first place. So there's an interesting intersection here between privileged disability and ableism. We're able to purchase this expense of trailer because of our income. So I think why not look at the question of subsidy to and why can't the assistive devices program, for example, the province of Ontario consider partial funding to technologies of this sort that broaden the experiences of everyday life or disabled persons if they want to cycle and potentially their relations.

Joeita Gupta:
Glen, I know you're looking at doing some research in Indonesia, but you heard Ron talk about just some of the challenges with affordability of adaptive equipment and cycles in Canada. Do you think there's some scope here for people with disabilities in Canada to get together and maybe apply some of that ingenuity that we talked about a few minutes ago in the program? The person who invented the first cycle was a paraplegic. Do you think there's some scope here for people with disabilities to start to tinker and while the government go back and forth, deciding on the best funding model to actually try and come up with something that might be more cost-effective for people with disabilities?

Glen Norcliffe:
Well, there's two situations that present themselves here. One is recreational cycling. Now I gave the example of the track in Finkley Park, London where people are sharing. That type of program sharing obviously brings a cost way down. In fact, a volunteer group basically created all those bicycles, so there's very no cost involved. But if you want a bicycle for your daily life to get from A to B, to work, to study whatever it is, then it is expensive. And the most obvious solution that I can see is some subsidy program because I mean, I'll give you the example. There's the clip-on cycle is with e-assist is over $10,000. That's the price. Can you bring the price down?
Well, the problem is that most of these cycles are customized by the maker. It's difficult to buy. If I wanted somebody wanted a bicycle made in Germany, you're not going to get that tweaking and customizing to the needs of each individual. And most of these disability bikes, adaptive bikes do need tweaking if you like, customizing for individual needs. And that means you've got to have proximity, you've got to be reasonably close. That means small production, small volume, and unfortunately high prices.

Ron Buliung:
To Glen's point, I can confirm that with the white trailer, it doesn't come out of the box ready for Usher's body. So there are a number of bolsters and even other things that we've done with pillows and to try to make it more secure and a more comfortable ride for her. We actually used the cushion off of her power wheelchair as the base in the stroller. And that cushion I think is nearly a thousand dollars. So that ingenuity piece is always there. There's an element of creativity that I think we fail to imagine and fail to capture, not just within the disability and cyclone space, but disability in everything space.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, on that note though, we do have to wrap it up. Glen and Ron, I wish we had longer to chat, but I'm looking at the clock and we are just about out of time. Thank you both for being here today. It was so great to talk to you.

Glen Norcliffe:
Thank you. It is been a pleasure

Ron Buliung:
And thanks so much. Take care.

Joeita Gupta:
Glen Norcliffe and Ron Buliung talking about their article Dealing with Disability and Cycling Technology, a socio-historical analysis that was published in the Disability Studies Quarterly, and I will think about both of them the next time I can on attend and bike. As I said to Glen and Ron, we do have to run, but thank you so much for listening. If you've got any feedback, you can write to us at feedback@ami.ca. You can find us on Twitter at AMI-audio. Use the #pulseami. You can give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. And don't forget to leave your permission to play the audio on the program. Our technical producer is Marc Aflalo. My videographer today has been Ted Cooper. Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for podcasts at AMI-audio. Andy Frank is the manager of AMI-audio. And I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.