Harrie Larrington-Spencer talks accessible cycling with Professor Rachel Aldred

Professor Aldred talks to Harriet Larrington-Spencer, a researcher at Healthy Active Cities at the University of Salford. Harriet, or Harrie, developed an interest in active travel after experiencing cycling in Copenhagen and the Netherlands, and after losing the use of her left arm following a collision with a driver. Harrie discovered that while a tricycle was far easier for her to use, the physical barriers and chicanes in place on many of Britain’s cycleways make the use of three wheels challenging.

Harrie talks about the challenges such infrastructure poses for non-standard cycle users, about other barriers to wider uptake, such as cost, what inclusive active travel would look like, and what research she would conduct, if money were no object. And, of course, about cycling with her dog, Frida.

Healthy Active Cities is a research group bringing together researchers from the University of Salford, as well as practitioners and policymakers to discuss issues in sustainable transport. You can find out more about their work here: https://blogs.salford.ac.uk/healthyactivecities/

TRANSCRIPT

00:00

Hi and welcome back to the Active Travel Podcast, brought to you by the Active Travel Academy, and to season two. We had a little break over Autumn, and we’ve all been busy working on lots of different projects, but we’re delighted to finally bring you the second episode – and we hope to have more in the weeks to come. But without further ado, let’s hand over to Professor Rachel Aldred, Active Travel Academy founder, and our guest.

So I'm really happy to be here for an episode of the active travel podcast with Harriet Larrington-Spencer, who is a researcher at Healthy Active Cities at the University of Salford. So hi, Harrie, good to have you here.

 

00:11

Hi, Rachel, thank you for having me.

00:14

Great. So one of the things I wanted to start with is really about how you got into this how you got into researching active travel, because one of the great things about active travel is that it's people from a whole range of different backgrounds in the field in terms of disciplinary backgrounds. So can you tell me how you got into it?

00:32

Yeah, it's so my academic background is originally not active travel, I come from a geography background. So my bachelor's is in geography. And then I moved to the Netherlands to do my master's, which was in water management and irrigation. So very different from active travel. And whilst I was there, and I did my Erasmus as part of my masters in Copenhagen, just I went from kind of cycling for, for recreation and, and a bit of sport to cycling every day, when you arrive at university as an international student in the Netherlands, they tell you no bike, no life. So you kind of the first thing, the first thing they give you is a list of all the secondhand places to buy a bike. And then from that moment, cycling just became my natural form of transportation. And when I saw then I started my PhD. Back in the UK, in Manchester, I was cycling everyday for transportation, and I got hit by a car. And then I had to start changing the type of cycling. So whilst I was cycling for transportation, I was also doing cycling for sport. But I had to kind of start working out how to cycle for transportation in a way that I could do, because the the car damaged my left arm, so it doesn't work, and my hand doesn't work anymore. So it became How could I use a two wheel bike. So I started doing doing that. And even on two wheels, I found quite a lot of barriers to cycling, and doing my everyday journeys that I just hadn't considered before. And then more recently, to make it a lot easier for myself, I have a trike, and so I can do my shopping and carry my dog more easily. And the barriers that were difficult to negotiate on a on a bike have become impossible to negotiate on a trike. And so it started from there really, and and thinking about active travelling that everybody has a has a right basically, it's kind of the right to the city is that everyone should be able to move actively around their local neighbourhood, and how to enable that.

02:43

Wow,

Wow, thank you now I am going to pick up on different bits of that. But just to go back to the Netherlands experience. So when you went to the Netherlands, had you been cycling much before in this country? Were you completely new to it?

02:55

No, so I wasn't completely new I grew up in the middle of in the kind of the middle of nowhere in the countryside. So to get to see friends it was always cycling. But also, it was cycling through farmland and fields and or very small country lanes. And it was never really it wasn't an everyday thing. So to actually get anywhere, we had no bus service, you had to learn to drive if you wanted to get anywhere independently and before kind of 17,18 cycling offered