This article explores how cycling is currently considered in European policy documents related to transport aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), what kind of representation of cycling can be imagined for utopian EC IoT policies documents, and how a combination of empirical policy analysis and a utopian approach could inform future policy and research. Debates around smart/intelligent/data mobilities and the IoTincluding policy debatestend to be dominated by motorized modes such as autonomous and networked cars. This article explores the implications of this for more sustainable and active modes such as cycling, both for current policies and for utopian thinking. It draws on literature concerned with utopian thinking, mobilities studies and critical data studies. The methodology combines a content analysis and a visual analysis of the EC policy documents with creating text and images for utopian future versions of these documents. The results show the heavy automotive focus of EC IoT policy documents and suggest an alternative bicyclefocussed IoT utopia. The conclusion facilitates a debate around utopian societies where smart cycling products, infrastructure, policy and funding facilitate sustainable, active and data-responsible mobility at scale. This challenges the current continuation of automobile cultures in smart mobility and IoT policy discourses, and the data and associated power asymmetries between cars and cycling that highlight the significance of this research.
ARTICLE HISTORYa different critical direction: bringing active transport into the data-centred planning process; making cycling central to IoT debates and policies. Utopian thinking is important in this process, as to not just identify how marginalised active modes of transport are in current policy debates, but to also suggest alternative future policies where cycling takes centre stage in smart mobility and IoT discourses and the policy landscape, and also to highlight the sharp contrast to current state of affairs, and as provocation to the car-centric approaches of those engaging in these discourses and policies. The benefits of cycling-focussed mobility over automobile-focussed mobility have been discussed at length in the academic literature (e.g. Pucher and Buehler 2017; Fishman 2016), including positive impacts at individual and societal level on health, sociability, urban development, air pollution, CO2 emissions, energy, safety, congestion, etc.Specifically, the article asks: How is cycling currently considered in European policy documents related to transport aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT)? What kind of representation of cycling can be imagined for utopian EC IoT policies documents? How could a combination of empirical policy analysis and a utopian approach inform future policy and research?The first part of the article draws on the literature on utopian thinking, mobilities studies and critical data studies, next, the methodology explains the textual and visual analysis of the EC policy document and the creating of utopi...