June is Bike Month and to celebrate the event, EUC work-study student Gurneet Singh interviews Professor Emeritus Glen Norcliffe about his current project and its implications for the velomobiles industry in Indonesia as well as the global market.
Q: Can you please share an overview of the goal and objectives of your project on “Velomoblity for Disability“?
The project aims to understand the design, manufacture, and range of adaptive mobility devices for people with disabilities, as well as the innovative ergonomic designs created to address a wide range of disabilities. The project has expanded as we’ve gone along and learned. It was initially strictly focused on bicycles, but now we are also looking at other mobility devices such as wheelchairs and electric wheelchairs and various others. In Indonesia, we discovered that many disabled people use the sidecars of motorbikes to get around. Some will roll their wheelchair into the sidecar, and then drive the motorbike with nobody sitting on the motorbike by driving it from the sidecar. The purpose of the project is to understand how the designs came into being, how they’re made in different settings, and their functionality.
The other half of the work involves users with a wide range of disabilities and asking them whether or not the design of their adaptive device serves their needs, and if it doesn’t, what changes would improve it. The project looks at both makers and users, which is a little different because a lot of the work on disability has been on social and political exclusion. Very few people have looked at the actual making of the disability devices and manufacturing. This topic interests me because I’ve been working for a while as an Industrial Geographer. I have been interested in the geography of industry for the last 60 years.
Q: Why was Indonesia selected as the country for this project? And what are the differences between Indonesia, Canada, and Western Europe that led these regions to being chosen for this project?
Until recently, I had been working in China. China makes most of the world’s bikes, although the industry is beginning to move out to Vietnam and India. But since the Chinese and Canadians don’t get on at the moment, I had to move my research. Canada and Western Europe are both part of the Global North and wealthy. Indonesia is a low-income country, and most Indonesians can’t afford fairly sophisticated Western-produced mobility devices like adaptive bikes. I have been to Indonesia twice already and have contacts there. In particular, I had become friends with someone who runs the Ride-to-Work program in Jakarta. I wrote to him and asked if there would be interest in this, and he said yes. He sent me a video of a man, an amputee, who rides through Jakarta, all traffic, on a one-legged folding bike. He rides 6 kilometres from his home in a Kampung (an urban village) to a railway station. He has to fold his bike because he’s not allowed to take a full bike on the train, takes the train to work, and then rides the last kilometre to his workplace. I also wrote to two colleagues at the University of Brawijaya in Malang, a city in East Java. There are two million people, so it’s quite a big city. I wrote to Alies Poetri Lintangsari, and Alies wrote back, saying yes, I’d like to work on this project. And I wrote to Sugiono Sutopawiro, a professor of industrial engineering who was interested in the industrial side, specifically the ergonomics of production. So, with two partners there and a partner in Austria, Annika Kruse, who is a member of the Department of Health at the University of Graz, who researches various therapies for disabled persons, we had a good team. And the project has gone well. I haven’t visited Austria, but I have worked with one Dr. Kruse’s students in Austria, Hanna Auer, and we’ve done a number of interviews in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden, and that’s what we’re writing up at the moment. (See also a Frontiers in Sports and Active Living article on The impact of cycling on the physical and mental health, and quality of life of people with disabilities: A scoping review (2025).
Q: Your work spans a wide range of interests, including global trade, environmental management, and economic geography. Would this most recent project draw on your previous works and experiences? If so, in what ways?
It builds on a lot on my work in Africa, believe it or not. I did research with Dr. Donald Freeman (Emeritus Prof of EUC) on the informal economy. The way these adaptive bikes and motorbikes are being created in Indonesia, is very similar to the informal, rural non-farm economy work we did in Kenya in the 1970s. It also builds on my bike research. It connects with my work on development, including my core interest, which has always been industrial geography. This project is for me a form of industrial geography. I’m interested in the design, and in the materials, new and old. In Indonesia, they rarely use e-assist; I think it’s too expensive, they don’t make it locally, and there are import duties, but they do make and use little motorbikes. If a bike’s motor is less than 125 cc, the license is cheap. And so, many Indonesians drive around the cities on little motorbikes. So it’s not difficult for an artisan, an informal sector worker who does anything, to weld a sidecar onto the side of one of these motorbikes, a sidecar, and a ramp with two handles. You can pull yourself onto the sidecar; the controls, the speed, the brakes, everything, is moved over in front of the sidecar. You clamp the wheelchair in place so it doesn’t roll off the back when you’re going along, and away you go! And that is quite a common thing; you see a motorbike with nobody but a passenger on it going down the road, you realize what’s going on if you look closely. The Indonesian government has created a special category of license called a ‘D’ license for disability, and you can drive these bikes with a ‘D’ license, which is relatively cheap compared to e-bikes. Adaptive bikes in Indonesia are cobbled together with welding and an old motorbike. They are far cheaper by using recycled materials, locally obtained materials, and low-wage labour to put it all together.
Q: Are you hoping that the research will help users become more engaged in the process of developing bikes that meet their needs, or that your research might improve the implementation of existing ideas that people want to see?
There is not a lot of awareness. Remember, 60% of Indonesians live in towns and cities, and 40% are still rural farmers. There’s not much information about adaptive bikes in either setting. One of the men we interviewed didn’t even know that he had multiple sclerosis until he got to university. We interviewed two people whose jobs had been harvesting coconuts. They fell out of the trees and broke their back, becoming paraplegic and needing hand bikes. Some of them took a while to discover that there were such things as hand bikes. Polio lingered much longer in Indonesia, where a vaccine campaign presented a big and costly project. Whereas in the West polio was eradicated quickly once a vaccine was available, in Indonesia it hung on a lot longer, so we’re interviewing people who may have had polio, which can affect any part of the body, but mostly it affects the legs. The most telling interview I had was with a young mother; she had muscular dystrophy. The upper body of people with muscular dystrophy is often impacted. She has trouble holding things with her hands. For some reason, the lower body is usually more functional. I asked her whether we could record the interview and take her picture, and she said, “Yes, you may record it.” I said, “Would you like your husband to sign [the consent form] for you?” She replied, “Oh, I can sign it.” She sat down on the floor, picked up a pen with her right foot and signed the form. Then she picked up her cell phone and scrolled with her left foot, took a photo of the consent form, and I was just staggered. Then we went out; her husband had to help her put her hands on the handlebars of the bike. For people with muscular dystrophy, it is recommended that they exercise as much as possible, so she tries to ride every day. She and her son went off for a ride down the laneway, and I videoed her. One or two days a week, she rides a little bit further and sells bits and pieces at a local market to make a bit of money. That’s a little anecdote of the kinds of things that are going on.
Q: What impact are you and your research team hoping to create with this project? Is there anything you can share that your team has found to date that has potential to improve the process of creating cycle designs?
I recently submitted a paper to a journal called Active Travel, jointly written with my two Indonesian colleagues. In it, we conclude that there are design possibilities, there’s cheap labour in Indonesia, and that they might consider attempting to copy the Taiwan model, which, nearly 40 years ago, decided to launch a bicycle industry, as the Western bicycle industry in England, the United States, and other countries was foundering because bikes were made cheaper in Asia. And so, the government legislated policies intended to create a Taiwanese bicycle Industry. That industry, in turn, invested in China. They still make top-end carbon fibre bikes in Taiwan, but low-end bikes plus all the gears, [Shimano] and so on, are made in huge factories near Shanghai. China’s still the world’s largest bike maker, but it’s trying to move up to high value-added industries. This is why the bike industry is showing signs of moving out to Cambodia, Vietnam, and possibly Bangladesh and India. If Indonesia followed a similar model, they could become the world’s center for manufacturing adaptive bikes. It’s a policy statement, and it involves commitment to getting makers going and moving to better equipment. It’s a market that nobody has pursued. It matches the low wages of Indonesia, which is an industrializing country in the Global South. Currently, there is a lot of investment in rare earths in Indonesia, but the problem with that is that it’s an extractive economy. Even though they still need to process the minerals before they leave the country, which is good, it’s not actually manufacturing, so it’s still an extractive industry. Indonesia needs to think about becoming a manufacturing power, and this is one of the niches that I think they could do well in. They haven’t realized the potential of exports; they could be exporting them everywhere, especially if we get past this Trump phase of protectionism everywhere. Hopefully, this protectionism and emphasis on autarky is a short-term phenomenon. If Indonesia doesn’t grab this market, other countries like Mexico, the Philippines or India might.
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Glen Norcliffe has been a member of the Geography Department at York University for over 50 years, including terms as Chair of Geography and Director of the Graduate Program in Geography. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Geography and Senior Scholar at York University. Norcliffe’s research focuses on the diverse geographies of industry and its (de)globalization, the geographical construction of technology, the performance of the economy in various geographical settings, and, recently, adaptive technologies that aid the mobility of persons with disabilities.
His current project, “Velomobility for Disability,” which will be completed in May 2026, examines both makers and users of a wide range of adaptive cycles, asking how cycle designs for persons with a disability are developed, whether users contribute to design, and to what extent they meet users’ needs. He is co-editor of Routledge Companion to Cycling (2023) that synthesizes a rapidly growing body of research on the bicycle, its past and present uses, its technological evolution, its use in diverse geographical settings, its aesthetics and its deployment in art and literature.