By Smruthi Bala Kannan

Emergent Conversation 23

This essay is part of the series Sustainable Urban Mobility in India, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 23.

6:30 am, Chennai  “Your laziness is overpowering your activeness!” chided the group chat message from the motivator and the coordinator of my local bicycling group. I had joined this group in a neighborhood in Chennai a week before, participated in only one session, and had missed this one. He reminded everyone in the group that we had missed out on a beautiful morning ride and a new route. Feeling ashamed for not waking up early enough, I set a few alarms on my phone for the next day, and canceled a few night meetings to accommodate.

7:00 am  I heard the calls of the daily greens vendor making his rounds on the cycle calling, “Arakeera, mulakeera”  (Two kinds of amaranth greens), cruising as much as he could and moving slowly enough so that each building he passed heard the names of all the greens that were in stock for the day.  I wondered where the greens vendor sat in the “activeness vs. laziness” discourse.

The vocabulary of laziness looms large in India’s middle-class bicycling communities, as the antithesis to the value of bicycling as an “active” form of leisure and transport. Another bicycle enthusiast and local group coordinator, in Delhi this time, explained that if a woman with young children can join early morning rides, other people should not use care work as an excuse to evade waking up early and leading an active lifestyle. Early morning rides are scheduled to avoid peak-hour traffic congestion and late-night risks on the road and accommodate office workers’ and college students’ schedules. While the “lazy-active” binary framed early morning group ride organizers’ dialogues around bicycling, the term “active” transportation also has a key place among researchers (Shkera and Patankar 2024; Allirani, Verma, and Sasidharan 2023; Millett et al. 2013) and global organizations that influence public policy (World Health Organization 2018). The more I watch videos and scramble through my sketches from our[1] fieldwork in Chennai and Delhi, the more I wonder about the choice of the adjective “active” to describe bicycling. Do people who bicycle every day for commute, trade, and school on the roads of Chennai and Delhi think about being “active”? If policy and infrastructure intend to promote bicycling, what can laziness offer to them?

“Active” Transportation

The emergence of the term “active” transportation or mobility in countries such as the U.S. (Shalala 1996), and global discourses (THE PEP 2012) in the late 1990s and early 2000s intended to promote walking and bicycling for their physical activity benefits. The active mobility discourse followed the boom in private automobile use after about three decades. The automobile boom largely included cars in the North American and European context. While cars were taken up less aggressively in South Asia during this period, motorized two-wheelers have had and continue to have a wide user base here. The active mobility discourse in high-income countries stems from decades of research and persuasion by health agencies against the negative impacts of automobile-centric planning on human health and the environment.

The adjective “active” in this discourse conjures images of “sustained physical exertion” (Cook et al. 2022). “Active” transportation reduces the sedentary nature of transportation while also cutting down on traffic emissions and fuel consumption, doubling as a sustainable form of transportation. Walking and bicycling are promoted as lifestyle and mobility suggestions to those in sedentary occupations in the Global South—folks like me and some of my fellow bicycle group riders. While this suggestion is valuable, using activity as a framing discourse for urban bicycle infrastructure planning and policy across the paradigm risks missing out on current and quotidian cyclists in these regions. Such cyclists often work in substantially less sedentary livelihoods, and, in addition, have continued to bicycle every day for several decades amidst and despite the booming automobile traffic.

My reflections in this short article emerge from a multi-city, multi-institutional project on equitable and healthy urban environments (see acknowledgements for project details and credits). We were a team of anthropologists, transport engineers, and public health specialists exploring fundamental questions about urban cycling in India through qualitative mixed-methods research[2] — Who bicycles? What are their experiences? What barriers and discomforts do they face? As a part of this project, my fellow researchers and I observed bicycling patterns in Delhi and Chennai through 2022 and 2023, across different parts of the city, weather conditions, and types of roads. We observed that many cyclists ride slowly and steadily along road edges, often using their bicycles to carry loads, goods, or pillion riders.

While the discourse of “active” bicycling might apply to people engaging in sedentary work, such as office and desk-based jobs, bicycles largely contribute to reducing the strain of personal travel by walking (or running). They are ultimately machines (Arnold 2013)—running machines, mechanical horses (Wilson and Schmidt 2020). For instance, when governments and philanthropic organizations distribute bicycles as a pathway to access school and thus empowerment, cycles are meant to ease the burden of walking long distances (Muralidharan and Prakash 2017). Among the many people who use bicycles for trade or care-work whom I see in Chennai and Delhi, bicycles reduce the load they need to carry. We observed during our research in the cities that bicycling is a way to be relaxed on the road.

8:00 am, Chennai  Children stand and pedal a few times using their body weight, and cruise along at the pace of the slow motorist riding by their side. Their heavy bags or younger siblings are on the carrier. Just sitting with the wind on their face, the young bicyclists take a minute or more long pauses between a few pedals till the cycle slows down fully and then pedal again, standing.

Older kin—mothers, fathers, grandfathers, siblings—of young, tired children getting back from school used a cycle so that children do not have to walk, and caregivers do not have to carry the children home. After all, they were growing up, and their bags were heavy too!

Do you recall old Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali movies where a group of friends or romantic couples sing to each other as they bicycle on the road? Bicycles continue to be used to saunter on the way back from work or school, chatting with friends.

Seeing these forms of bicycling as leisure and relaxation is neither about the users’ intent to gain physical activity, nor is it about having time off from productive or reproductive work that one has to do. It is rather to relax and engage in leisure while on the way to, or at work.

Bicycling together or socializing around a bicycle, much like socializing in other forms on public spaces and transportation, accounts for much of a bicycle’s life in Chennai and Delhi. Bicycling together has even been used as a methodology to study bicycling in the Indian context (Anjaria 2024).

Automobile- and speed-centric roads, and heavier and faster vehicles, have meant adults and educational programs warn children against doing precisely this— they ask bicyclists to move predictably on the road, knowing one’s place, and slowly in a corner, watchfully (unpublished data). A lot of the instructions children and new bicyclists are offered regarding the road, and very necessarily so, are about caution against speeding motorized vehicles. Bicyclists, while on the road, must maintain the amount of cognitive attention a fast-moving vehicle would require, because they occupy the road alongside other vehicles that can move fast. In parallel, maps and digital screens on cars and electric two-wheelers also demand some of the cognitive attention that these automobile drivers should keep on the road.

11.00 am  On my way to a fieldsite, I see a domestic cleaning worker stop on the roadside. She picks up a phone call, tucks it between her shoulder and head, and starts to bicycle. I see a few more through the day, bicyclists stopping on the roadside to see their phones.

A Case for Lazy Transportation

Disability studies scholars and critical theorists of race, caste, and class have often reminded us that affective vocabulary such as “lazy” alongside “stupid” or “dirty” are tools of othering (Paik 2014, Rose 2017, Ginsberg and Rapp 2024). Such words shift blame for the disconnect between people’s needs and institutions onto the individuals themselves.  The discursive binary of “lazy” and “active” allows an under-accounting of the structural concerns and exclusions embedded in the institutional, infrastructural, or societal fabric. In this case, the road system, within the transportation systems at large (Sheller 2018), is an institution—an artifact of human design, intent, and rules—and a social fabric on which various forms of normalization and exclusion play out.

“I am just too lazy to …” is a phrase I had heard thrice already during the first week of my fieldwork for the bicycle research project in 2022. This was predominantly from middle-class people who occasionally bicycled for commute, leisure, or a neighborhood grocery errand. They had alternate private motorized vehicles available to them. Some had bicycled as children and mentioned they had no other impediments to resuming bicycling as adults apart from their lack of effort and time. Once they started elaborating on their excuses, their lengthy and circuitous explanations were filled with concerns of road safety, access to convenient bicycle designs, and histories of harassment and discomfort during travel, amongst others. What, then, did people mean when they ascribed laziness to themselves, while moving fast on automobiles and getting work done through the day?

A central focus of urban transportation planners is to enable easy and safe access to different places and transportation options. This essentially means reducing the barriers to engaging in or participating in the city’s public life and providing access to work and care. However, if we see the “active” transportation discourse alongside the long history of the use of othering and stigma in colonial contexts as a tool in urban planning, we get to a slippery slope:  who is responsible for enabling “activity”? Whose “activity” is considered appropriate and in place, while others remain a threat or a nuisance? Othering goes hand in hand with the processes through which some individuals are disparately blamed for structural issues, while others partake in causing them.

Laziness and a Slow Mobility Machine

Bicyclists rest on the road. On busy roads in Delhi and Chennai, I frequently see vehicles—cars, trucks, motorized two-wheelers, and bicycles—cruising on the road, appreciating a smooth flat surface or a downward slope. It is considered driving commonsense for any automobile with an internal combustion engine that to cruise at a steady and relatively higher speed is more fuel efficient since the engine does not have to work hard (Halderman 2012). This is about 60 kilometers/hour for common two-wheelers. However, higher speeds are not feasible on the mixed-traffic roads in these cities, especially during peak traffic times. I rewind some of my field videos to rewatch and wonder how bicyclists cruise at the same speed as the petroleum-fueled two-wheelers by their sides. Bicyclists have ample incentive to cruise when we view bicycling as a convenience rather than exercise.

The need for less energy-intensive movement has been used as an argument to support electric vehicles. However, electric vehicles, even e-bicycles, are expensive compared to bicycles and lighter petroleum-fueled two-wheelers. Their weight and capacity for speed further add to the risks faced by fellow road users, especially bicyclists and pedestrians who need to remain cautious and, literally, on edge. Electric personal vehicles reinforce automobile-centric personal transportation and marginalize people who cannot afford automobiles and children who do not have driving licenses.

Viewing bicycling as a machine, a “lazy” form of transportation alongside automobiles, offers an alternative lens to non-motorized urban mobility. It offers a more equitable opportunity to be lazy, to rest, and be unproductive through transit while being gentler on the air, material resources, and fellow road users.

Regular bicyclists who commute in these cities often ride slowly and in a corner of the street, except on specific times and places where a large number of cycles move together at once in Delhi and Chennai. These groups are few, and are largely limited to either industry employees’ or schools’ schedules.

Bicyclists’ slow movement made it possible for our team members to wave and stop them to conduct surveys and interviews, and watch them closely as they moved. Younger cyclists zigzagging through congested traffic also often move quite slowly, perceiving, dodging, and slipping between moving cars, two-wheelers, and pedestrians. They share the road with other slower-moving bicyclists—chatting, humming songs, waving to roadside pedestrians or shop owners, stopping for small purchases like a snack or a tea, and even brushing their teeth.

Several of the bicyclists we encountered were during moments of rest—sitting in a circle in a park between the day’s domestic work schedules—cycling, stopping, cooking, and cleaning in different homes. We also got to observe children lick ice cream or pops as they sauntered on their bicycles, chatting with their friends. And yawning, lots of yawning throughout the day and the night, and I did my share when I was on the cycle around Chennai, too.

As they bicycled, parents and siblings talked about the day with the children sitting on their bicycles. We saw children sleep on bicycles as either pillion or front bar riders. They moved on their running and load-carrying machines with no motors accelerating or burning fuel.

Conclusion

How can we work towards taking bicycling past the active-lazy discourse to acknowledge the quotidian everyday cyclist who cruises and shifts between these two? Active transportation rhetoric risks missing out on the bicycle’s capacity to ease human movement, a foundational affordance in transportation.

Active transportation marks out cycling as a form of transportation worthy of an adjective while normalizing and rendering automobility ordinary and quotidian. This underscoring of bicycling as “active” brings along the possibility of “lazy,” in the sense of Derrida, who notes no word comes without its trace (Derrida and Spivak 2016). Can we think of alternative discourses that respect the balancing act that bicycles do in both easing transport while also retaining a measure of human effort and safety?

The imagination of a “lazy” person who does not bicycle situates the blame for not picking up the bicycle on the individual. However, this does not explain demographic patterns of class, age, gender, caste, ability, geography, etc., prevalent amongst cyclists. Further, it minimizes the possibility of lazy bicycling.

As I wrote up these notes and memos, Kavi Bhalla, my mentor in the bicycling project, said to me, “When I hear ‘Lazy Cycling,’ I wonder what James Scott would say about it … he would likely see lazy bicycling as a protest and resistance by people against capitalist forces.” Bicycles strike a versatile balance for those who can ride one. It offers respite in activity for those with sedentary occupations, while it provides respite from strain for those with physically intensive occupations. Bicycles make lazy roads possible.

For researchers—anthropologists, urban planners, transportation engineers, and policymakers—”lazy” proposes a productive framework to interrogate the shifting margins of active transportation in general and bicycling in particular. “Laziness” is a latent research area that may identify the limitations of current road networks more clearly. It is a portal for critical analysis. Moving past the “active” transportation framework and growth-oriented automobility, what questions can a close, critical, and careful reading of “laziness” help urban researchers explore?

Acknowledgments: This research was conducted during my work as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Chicago. I am grateful to the research collaboration and inputs from Kavi Bhalla, Rahul Goel, and Jonathan Anjaria, and the research support and assistance of Srishti Agrawal, Shivani, Ankush Pal, Joel Shelton Terrance, and Rohit M Nair. This work is supported by the Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities grant from the Wellcome Trust [209376/Z/17/Z] and the Susan and Richard Kiphart Center for Global Health and Social Development, University of Chicago.  

Smruthi Bala Kannan is an independent researcher and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University.

Notes

[1] The fieldwork in Delhi and Chennai discussed in the article is a part of a research project on bicycling in Low-and Middle-Income-Countries’ Cities. The funding and research team are as credited in the acknowledgements section. The broader mixed-methods research includes ethnographic research, intercept surveys with bicyclists, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. The reflections and empirical discussed here draws from the ethnographic research that I conducted as a part of this project and my discussions with team members. Any views and errors are mine.

[2] See above note.

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