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One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility. By Zack Furness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. Pp. xi+348. $24.95.
The field of "cycling studies," which has begun to emerge as a distinct research area only within the last decade, is small enough to leave plenty of knowledge gaps, particularly in the linkages between bicycle technology and cycling culture. In One Less Car, Zack Furness creates his own niche in the field, examining-with a mostly North American focus-the culture and politics of cycling advocacy within the context of wider concerns about automobility and urban planning, gender and race, globalization and capitalism. At one level, the book's focus is mostly on the activities and discourses that frame the use of technology, rather than the technology itself. However, bicycle technology does come to the fore in some of the discussion, and in any case part of Furness's argument concerns the interrelations of technology, culture, and politics.
Most of the book is focused on aspects of cycling that are...