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Spencer, Phoebe

Community Development and Applied Economics

2013

M.S.

Transportation and mobility are considered key components of quality of life because they mediate and shape the ways individuals interact with the built and natural environments around them. This work is focused on the importance of the experience of transportation, specifically the interactions between bicycle use and wellbeing. Previous scholarship demonstrates that bicycle use provides numerous benefits for riders by enhancing mobility through healthy and relatively inexpensive transportation. These factors are major components shaping the quality of life for individuals worldwide. Bicycfe use has clear and measureable impacts on health and environment, yet the specific effects of utilitarian bicycling on subjective perceptions and objective measures of quality of life are largely unknown.
Here, the relationship between quality of life, environment, and bicycle transportation are explored as mobility issues. Analysis of in-depth interviews with transportation cyclists and bicycle transportation professionals in Burlington, Vermont allow for an understanding of connections between bicycle transportation and quality of life within the context of a northern climate and a small city. Perceptions of wellbeing are expressed through both formal and vernacular discourses throughout a loosely defined bicycle community, while reactions to climatic and environmental factors are considered at the individual level.