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The absurd claim that cyclists, who very rarely cause even minor injuries, are the ‘real menace’ on the roads suggests an ideology under pressure. Hostility towards cyclists is a conspicuous recent inflection of a more general positioning or interpellation of the citizen as one who identifies him- or herself as a motorist, and is ‘pro-car’. This has deep roots in the political and material circumstances of the long postwar consumer boom, and is integral to the conceptions of prosperity and the good life that became hegemonic across the over-developed world in those years…. Only in this historical framework can we gauge the full potential meanings of ‘vélorution’, for car culture epitomises the extent to which popular majorities, trade unions and mainstream left-of-centre parties have embraced forms and structures of consumption that eco-critics, to little effect so far, denounce as destructive and unsustainable.
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