Bicycle Challenges PhD: Cycling-as-a-Service in the Netherlands (2017-21)

7th August 2017 - academic writing / city mobility | mobilité urbaine / dissertation / urban cycling | vélo urbain

The tension between bicycles, other vehicles and public space, or the mobility commons, is far from resolved in Dutch urban public spaces, as shown here in Gerard Douplein in de Pijp, Amsterdam.

Gerard Douplein in de Pijp, Amsterdam.

Welcome to the personal website of Brett Petzer, PhD candidate at the Eindhoven Technical University, working within the Sustainable Urban Mobility (SUM) PhD Program: Bicycle Challenges.

A bried Twitter-based discussion of urban space under the Corona pandemic is here. My most recent academic publication, on business models for bike share in the Netherlands, is here, and I discuss it on Youtube here.

About My Project

With funding from NWO, Pon Holdings, the Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, and the TU/e, my project seeks to describe the role of cycling-as-a-service in the urban mobility system of the Netherlands, both now and in the future. This research trajectory lies at the confluence of broader trends like the sharing economy (shared mobility, bikeshare), modal integration (the transition to seamless multimodal travel), and sustainability transitions. My PhD project seeks to do the following:

Define cycling-as-a-service in the Dutch context, examine the business models that these services embed, and provide a critique of these from a transport justice (Martens, 2017) perspective.
Describe the state of modal integration in the Netherlands now and its trajectories into the future, and examine how the potential of cycling-as-a-service as a connecting mode could be fully realised within these.
Establish how cycling-as-a-service could contribute to a sustainable urban mobility transition in the urban Netherlands, and the organisational, regulatory and socio-technical conditions required to support this.
Describe how the above could be implemented (that is, deliver a framework for policy design).

I am based in Eindhoven, in the southern Netherlands. My daily supervisor for this PhD is Dr.ir. Anna Wieczorek, with additional supervision from Professor Geert Verbong and Professor Hans Jeekel.

Download the Project Flyer (A4)

Feedback and Interest

If you are working in the field of cycling-as-a-service in the Netherlands, or have opinions on this subject, I would like to hear from you, and potentially interview you. Please contact me using the form below, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.