Past, present and future of sustainable mobilities: comparing bikeway guidelines development in China and The Netherlands, 1920s–2020s

Design guidelines play a crucial, but often under-appreciated, role in developing mobility infrastructures and cultures, including cycling. Design guidelines have long histories of codifying engineering practice, largely out of the public eye. Such engineering standards often describe actual practice better than policy documents, which are more subject to the vagaries of politics and express visions. Created outside the political arena, manuals wield outsized social power through standard setting but are rarely analysed in mobility studies. Specifically, this paper compares the development of bicycle lane design guidelines in two mature cycling nations, China and the Netherlands. Our qualitative analysis of such bikeway design manuals and their social and historical contexts, coupled with a modal split analysis, takes a long-term perspective (100 years+). A ‘5-Factor Cycling Cities’ analysis – considering urban form, mobility alternatives, transport policy, social movements, and cycling’s cultural status – focuses on the unexamined role of manuals in explaining the development of (urban) cycling over time. This paper initiates a theorization of the power of design manuals in the long-term shaping of mobilities and transitions. Manuals’ roles are often hidden, while they play a fundamental role in policy, with long-term impact on the design, planning, and use of mobility systems.