From previous research on disability and cycling, we know that people with disabilities encounter a range of barriers, from systemic, infrastructural, and spatial challenges to those related to costs for accessing bikes, and barriers connected to cultures of mobility that prevent people with disabilities from identifying as or being recognised as cyclists (Cox and Bartle, 2020; Incle, 2019; Nyberg and Levin, 2023; Larrington-Spencer, 2024; Sheller, 2018). I will begin this empirical section by introducing some of the barriers that emerged in the narrative interviews and that are then confronted by the bike schools, including the ambivalence of assistance and care relations present in the research participants’ lives. This section includes both research participants from the bike schools studied and those who did not participate but had cycling experiences as disabled persons.

Linda and Malin have an intellectual disability; both used to bike before the pandemic. Linda, a 45-year-old living in assisted housing, says she used to cycle, “but it is like I have lost the desire to cycle, when there was a pandemic, you wouldn’t be out too much and then you have lost control.” By losing control, Linda refers to being unable to practise her cycling regularly because of the pandemic.

COVID became a major barrier to maintaining her competence to use the bicycle and navigate traffic, as she was dependent on her assistant to guide her. Linda’s friend Malin, 35, has her own apartment but needs assistance from a mobile support team that checks on her twice a week. She walks a lot, uses transport services for specific occasions, but stopped cycling because of surgery.

Both Malin’s and Linda’s narratives highlight the importance of continuity in maintaining their cycling abilities, which, if they choose to participate, could potentially be restored through para-cycling practice organised by a bike school.

While most of the seniors hesitated to cycle outside the bike school, other research participants found ways to overcome barriers related to discomfort cycling in traffic. Sonja was born with a visual impairment that means she cannot drive a car. She thinks the bus is too time-consuming and inflexible; she prefers to ride her bike as her daily mode of transport. Her visual impairment makes her hesitate, saying, “Maybe that’s at the verge of what I’m capable of, but I’ll do it anyway.” For her, a motivator is how cycling affords independence from her husband: “I want to be an independent woman who lives my own life; asking for help is a bit complicated. I don’t want to be a nuisance; I want to fend for myself.” Sonja managed to overcome barriers to active travel, maintaining her independence, while other narratives reflected more complex dependencies. Bike school participant Hehna’s narrative reflects how her now deceased husband depended on her caring for him at home. Hehna says: “When my husband was alive, I used to ride a two-wheeled bicycle, but he didn’t want me to because of the risk of injury, and if I got hurt, I couldn’t take care of him, he thought.” Her story highlights how cycling mobility and (patriarchal) care relations intersect. Her husband’s care dependency became a barrier for her to take up cycling, which increased her reliance on a car. After he died, her daughter supported her in taking up cycling again, this time on a tricycle, which she learnt to ride at the bike school.

Like Hehna’s care relationship, which inhibited her cycling, other narratives illustrate how different forms of care relationships can create barriers to active mobility. Barbro, 48, who has deafblindness, prefers to walk or cycle to her workplace in the city centre. She is accustomed to travelling around the world as part of her work; when at home, she enjoys active travel and finds it more convenient than using public transport. Barbro rides a side-by-side bike, which requires two people pedalling. She says that most people who assist her do not complain about walking or biking with her, but she expresses a persistent worry “that the other person thinks it’s boring, and that affects me, and then my experience is not as fun as I feel that I’m forcing someone to ride a bike or walk with me.”

The narratives from Sonja, Hehna, and Barbro all illustrate different forms of relationships in which research participants negotiate care relations that pose potential barriers to their access to cycling. As Lotta maintains access to cycling by remaining independent from her husband’s care, Hehna’s husband’s care needs become a barrier to her accessing cycling. As Karin and Jessica discussed above, Barbro’s narrative illustrates that disabled persons must not only access suitable bikes but also receive assistance from care workers to become cyclists. Barbro’s narrative also exemplifies the fluidity of “care intimacy,” as assistants can also become barriers to participation if they fail to understand her access needs (Dokumaci, 2019), as shown in Barbro’s worry about “forcing” someone to support her cycling. These narratives illustrate what Pucci et al. (2026, p. 571) refer to as “the multidimensionality of accessibility” and how diverse accessibility-related challenges may arise that may not be adequately addressed, in this case, by the municipality home care service. Volunteers of bike schools, like those studied here, may play an important role in enabling velomobile access for marginalised groups, as they act as micro-activist affordances who open cycling opportunities through commoning accessibility to cycling.

Bike schools support accessibility to cycling by providing suitable bicycles, guidance on their use, and a safe environment for practice, thereby fostering cycling competence. To understand cycling inclusion and the ways that the initiatives common cycling, facilitators were asked to outline their recruitment strategies. Their responses included more than outreach efforts; they also discussed target groups and ways to negotiate social stigmas as potential barriers to participation. Eskil, a facilitator at the trike bike school, says that initially the organisation mainly focussed on rehab and paracycling, but it aimed to broaden its target group to include seniors. According to Eskil, while the practice of tricycling was mainly aimed at enabling disabled people to compete in cycling competitions, including seniors would shift the focus from competition to supporting their continued cycling.

Like other examples of community-based transport initiatives for seniors, this initiative not only addresses mobility needs but also aims to support the social networks of the participants (Pucci et al., 2026). Recruitment of participants is mainly conducted through advertisements in local news media and attempts to recruit through organisations for seniors have had limited success. For Eskil, an important aspect of recruitment has been linking seniors with the disability community, but the organisations that coordinate seniors did not want to be associated with “disability,” he says. To address this potential barrier, instead of using the word “disability” when recruiting seniors, they wrote: “when the two-wheeler doesn’t work.” This allowed them to promote their platform as an opportunity to engage with tricycles – not engage with disabilities per se. Eskil refers to age and disability as a “grey zone,” not implying that cyclists are “grey” as they age, but because participants in the senior group would not identify as “disabled,” despite having Parkinson’s, stroke experiences, and severe balance issues. He states that the trike bike school is both about social activities for seniors and about facilitating training in parasports. “Seniors are impaired in various ways, which can prevent cycling, and we can help them overcome these barriers.”

Most seniors join the initiative because they can no longer ride a two-wheeled bike. For Eskil, the goal is to get more people to cycle and support their quest to “never stop cycling.” They have a strategy that participants can try, and the bike school staff will do their best to facilitate their participation by addressing body-bike relations that prevent participants from accessing cycling.

The quote exemplifies how the facilitator Eskil understands accessibility not as an individual concern but as a collective one, which demands opportunities for learning activities and skill-building, solutions that the initiative can provide through collective action (Pucci et al., 2026). Also, in their efforts to support trike bike cycling, the organisers had to consider social stigma as a potential concern. Eskil’s quote speaks to previous studies that identified negative attitudes and associated stigma towards tricycles, linking trikes to old age and disability (Hagemeister et al., 2018). However, despite Eskil’s concerns, none of the seniors interviewed expressed any hesitance to use tricycles due to worries about image and social stigma, quite the opposite. Johannes states that “if it wasn’t for the initiative, I wouldn’t have tried these bikes, nor would my wife.” Hehna, who has been recovering from knee surgery for several years, says she did not feel embarrassed using her trike in public: “People just watch and think it’s fun. I never cared if it would be embarrassing; I care about myself.” Eskil highlights the importance of community in overcoming barriers, a point supported by earlier research on bike schools, which found that social communities were significant enablers of cycling and of building cycling capacity among disadvantaged populations (Balkmar et al., 2026; Fonseca and Esteves, 2026; Silonsaari, 2025).

The paracycling section of the trike bike school struggled to recruit participants. Bengt, who oversees this part of the initiative, stated he aimed to recruit through schools and demonstrate to young people in wheelchairs that tricycles are accessible to them. However, limited time and challenges in accessing schools hindered efforts to reach new members. Instead, they are dependent on websites and Facebook to promote their programme to potential participants. Conversely, the bike school for women with immigrant backgrounds employed different recruitment strategies. Henrietta, the facilitator, emphasised the importance of taking the time to build trust with potential participants, who often have very low confidence in official bodies such as local authorities and the government. There are also strategic partnerships with organisations serving the target group, such as language schools, churches, or other significant meeting places, to help direct women towards the programme. Alongside building trust and advertising the bike school through these organisations and online communities, the presence of women organisers and segregated bike schools also helped attract women participants. In addition, Swedish cycling culture had a positive impact on women signing up for the bike school. For example, Sabine, who wants to use cycling as a mobility option for exercise and work, says that moving to Sweden made her realise how common cycling was, also for women, and that she therefore “had to learn to bike.” For a mother like Amy, her children’s cycling abilities were a strong reason why she joined the bike school – learning to bike would enable her to accompany her child to school by bike.

None of the bike schools demonstrated much diversity among staff. While the bike school for women attempted to recruit instructors from the participant group, they failed. The situation was somewhat different for the trike bike school, where male instructors had disabilities and ranged in age from younger to older. The facilitator, Tomas, emphasises that staff diversity is important, primarily to “normalise the presence of people with disabilities in the role as instructors.” However, none of the interviewed participants mentioned perceiving a lack of diversity among instructors as a problem or a hindrance to their participation.

Adequate levels of accessibility enable a person to take part in needed and desired activities, including active modes such as cycling (Pucci et al., 2026). The bike schools studied provided bikes that suited the needs of their participants to reduce access-related barriers. For example, the women’s bike school lowered the saddles on ordinary two-wheeled bikes to allow participants to practise balance. The trike bike school provided trikes in several forms, including hand-pedalled versions and various wheel configurations, allowing participants to try different types of trikes to determine which were suitable for their needs (Clayton and Parkin, 2016).

While the seniors expressed a desire to develop their capacity to sustain their often lifelong commitment to cycling by using a trike, the disabled individuals primarily seek access to bikes and a safe space to practice cycling. For Jessica, a 36-year-old woman with Down syndrome, cycling with her father during practice is part of her weekly routine. She uses the bike school mainly for exercise and fitness, and she has no intention of cycling independently outside the initiative. To participate, she relies on her father’s support, but she hopes that her “assistant will come along too” to support her cycling practice. Her previous assistant was a keen cyclist, and they often rode a tandem bike with rear-seat steering, which provides adaptive cycling for riders with Down syndrome, autism, and balance issues. The design allowed Jessica to sit at the front, with her assistant behind her, steering. With the trike bike providing balance, she can cycle alone, but she still feels the need for someone to cycle alongside her. Jessica’s case thus exemplifies several instances of “people as affordances” (Dokumaci, 2019) that facilitate access to cycling, including her father, who supports her cycling; the (potential) affordances of her assistant; and the facilitators at the cycling organisation, who provide access through adapted bikes and safe training facilities.

63-year-old Karin, who uses a wheelchair and a hand-pedalled bicycle, mainly cycles for exercise. “I would like to cycle more if I had the time. I have a mobility scooter, but you don’t get any exercise from that. Cycling is fun, and it gives exercise.” By participating in the bike school, she can benefit from the health advantages cycling offers to people with disabilities (Clayton and Parkin, 2016). Like Jessica, Karin requires an assistant to cycle with her, which limits how often she can train. At cycling practice, she told me that: “For me, it’s the last time today because I can’t come here on Thursdays, which is the new practice time. I don’t have many assistant hours.” For Karin, access to cycling is more than just a matter of distributing mobility resources; it depends on the allocation of social services within the Swedish social care system.

For participants who do not require assistance to use a trike, like 25-year-old Sofia, access to cycling is more manageable than in Jessica’s and Karin’s situations. During the summer months, when there are no scheduled activities at the trike bike school, Sofia can borrow a trike for private use. This allows her to continue exercising by bike without having to buy one herself. As Cox and Bartle (2020) discuss, the financial costs of acquiring an adapted bicycle can be a significant challenge. Sofia says, “I would like to cycle more in everyday life, my biggest obstacle for this is the cost, I can’t afford to buy a bike that costs 4000 Euro just like that, so it is the financial part that is the biggest obstacle.” Sofia has a job but does not see herself financially able to buy a trike, even though it could potentially make her less dependent on a car.

The participants in the bike school for women also had difficulty affording their own bikes. The instructors were often asked where to get cheap second-hand bikes once participants had learnt to cycle. Some participants had already bought their own second-hand bike. Other access-related challenges the bike school addressed concerned participants’ time to take part in the training due to care responsibilities. Here, the main strategy from the bike school was to maintain a low participation threshold (drop-in), which made it easier for women with care responsibilities to participate. To conclude, access to bikes was facilitated for all groups during practice, but significant cost-related barriers to accessing bikes remained for participants in the trike bike school. This was less the case for the bike school for women with immigrant backgrounds, who could access second-hand bikes at reasonable prices. For both groups, care dependencies remained a challenge to participating in the bike schools.

The strategies for building competence in cycling are organised in different ways. For example, the bike school for immigrant women supported progression through a simple “step-by-step” programme – with the final step being to cycle in traffic and practise traffic rules. A similar approach was not considered feasible at the trike bike school, even though the organisers encouraged participants to practise turning techniques on slalom courses and in other ways that mimicked “real-world” cycling. For most participants, trike bikes were a new experience and a form of cycling that required considerable practice. For the senior participants, learning to use a trike bike can be quite overwhelming. Hanna experiences balance problems due to several accidents involving her two-wheeled bike. Hanna says that when she bought the trike bike, she understood it would require a different technique, but not that it would be as difficult as it turned out to be.

This quote illustrates how participants can build competence through their own practice. The volunteers’ verbal and hands-on physical support exemplify how people can become affordances for participants, helping Hanna to overcome mobility barriers (Dokumaci, 2019). If needed, the bikes are customised to better suit the individual’s physical needs. The cycling trainers, Eskil, Tomas, and Bengt, build participants’ competence with the trike by helping beginners around the running track and offering support. Despite the challenges participants face when learning to use the trike bikes, these challenges also serve as motivation. Britta has cycled all her life but cannot use a two-wheeled bike due to osteoporosis and poor balance. She exemplifies a common theme in the interviews with the seniors: “When you get this old, you think it’s the last time you swam in the sea, the last time I’ve danced, it’s the last time I ride a bike, but I refuse that, I’d love to ride a bike.” The seniors’ lifelong cycling appropriation was therefore primarily maintained by the initiative, as for most participants, cycling occurred mainly within the safe confines of the programme.

The results show that seniors and disabled participants experienced barriers to cycling independently, often due to cost-related barriers to accessing suitable bikes and the assistance needed to become cyclists. Important motivators for participating in practice sessions are socialising and exercise; being part of the cycling initiative and its social context was a key reason why the participants remained active cyclists (Berent et al., 2021). Even though the initiatives managed to lower barriers for seniors and disabled people to access and develop cycling competence with trike bikes, these groups rarely appropriated cycling into their everyday lives. While none of the disabled participants and two of the seven senior participants expected to continue cycling beyond the protected environment of the trike bike school, all women with immigrant backgrounds anticipated continuing to cycle and expressed an ambition to incorporate it into their daily lives after completing the course.

The narratives further suggest that many of the participating women articulated compelling and multifaceted reasons for incorporating cycling into their everyday lives. These motivations included enhancing employability, facilitating social participation, enabling mobility with their children, reducing transport expenditure, improving health, and contributing to environmental sustainability (see Balkmar et al., 2026) – findings that have also been emphasised in previous studies (van der Kloof, 2022; Sersli et al., 2022). While women with immigrant backgrounds might encounter barriers related to racial and gendered power relations in public space (Davidson, 2021), their able-bodiedness suggests they have a greater capacity to adapt to the presumed norm of the confident, able-bodied, and individualised mobile subject (Doughty and Murray, 2016). Although cycling mainly remained an opportunity for exercise and socialising for the participants in the trike bike school, it is likely that their motility has improved – that is, the way in which the participants appropriate their access and competence in cycling – if the transport system better facilitates conditions suitable for differently aged and (dis)abled bodies (Flamm and Kaufmann, 2006; Middleton and Samanani, 2021; Sheller, 2018).