About the project
Cargo bikes are promoted as a sustainable alternative to car-based travel, but their use as care infrastructure in a family setting is under-explored. This project seeks to investigate how these technologies function within family contexts and how their use may shape everyday mobility practices, children’s experiences, and transport equity.
The role that cargo bikes might play in family mobility remains under-explored in the UK context. How they fit into, or potentially reshape, existing mobility practices has important implications for gendered patterns of mobility and care, children’s understandings of cycling, and the reproduction of norms around who cycles. This project will explore these themes.
The project is intentionally flexible and will be shaped by you. It may focus on, or combine, several interconnected research strands, such as:
- everyday family practices: exploring how cargo bikes influence school runs, caring responsibilities, trip-chaining, and time pressure, and how different forms of physical, emotional, and planning labour are distributed within households
- children’s experiences of the city: investigating how travelling by cargo bike shapes children’s perceptions of safety, independence, learning, and belonging, as well as their identification with cycling as a mode of transport
- equity and access: examining who is able to adopt cargo bikes and who is excluded, and analysing the role of cost, housing, storage, infrastructure, cultural norms, and policy. This includes critical consideration of whether cargo bikes reduce family mobility inequalities or risk reinforcing existing class differences
- traffic engineering and road safety: analysing how current street design standards accommodate cargo bikes used for family travel and how interventions might be adapted to improve both perceived and objective safety
- cargo bikes and the transport socio-technical system: examining how technologies, infrastructures, institutions, and social norms interact to enable (or constrain) their integration into everyday urban mobility.
The School of Engineering is committed to promoting equality, diversity inclusivity as demonstrated by our Athena SWAN award. We welcome all applicants regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or age, and will give full consideration to applicants seeking flexible working patterns and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy, onsite childcare facilities, and offers a range of benefits to help ensure employees’ well-being and work-life balance. The University of Southampton is committed to sustainability and has been awarded the Platinum EcoAward.
