How can we get more women cycling (and into the cycle industry)?

While there are most definitely more women riding bicycles now than 15 years ago – British Cycling is ahead of the curve here with Breeze rides and other initiatives – there still aren’t enough women on bikes. Famously, in the Netherlands, the gender split is 51 percent women to 49 percent men.

And there aren’t enough women in the cycle industry, either. This is not for the want of trying. At an industry event yesterday Isla Rowntree of Islabikes told me she can’t attract women job-seekers for love nor money. Islabikes is a childrens’ bicycle brand not a testosterone-fuelled roadie company yet for every 50 job seekers answering Islabike adverts 50 will be men, said Isla.

On job adverts some other bicycle companies have been known not to state they are bicycle companies – but once their cover is blown the number of women applicants drops away.

The photographs on this gallery show that there are women cyclists – in civvies – battling against the crappy cycling conditions (the pix were all shot in London on the same day) but, clearly, there would a whole lot more if the hostile road conditions weren’t quite so hostile.

This is a point made by researchers led by cycle advocate and University of Westminster academic Dr Rachel Aldred. The research found that growing cycling levels have not been accompanied by greater age and gender diversity.

The researchers first looked at the relationship between cycling levels and gender balance in all English and Welsh local authorities, using the 2001 and 2011 Census data. In both years there was a clear relationship: areas where cycling levels were higher, such as Cambridge, had a greater proportion of female cyclists. By contrast in areas with very low cycling levels, the gender ratio was extremely unequal, with men up to 14 times more likely to cycle to work than women.

The research was carried out for the Economic and Social Research Council, and was part of a project led by the Centre for Diet and Activity Research and the National Institute for Health Research. According to a press release from ESRC Inner London is one of cycling’s success stories in that cycle commuting rose from 3.8 percent to 7.2 percent of workers from 2001 to 2011. However, gender disparities remain, with men continuing to be around 50 percent more likely to cycle to work than women.

Dr Aldred said:

“We know from the Netherlands and Denmark that women and older people will cycle, if the conditions are right. But these results show that UK policy-makers cannot assume that if cycling grows it will inevitably become more diverse. This has not happened and so we should be targeting policy towards currently under-represented groups.

In particular, evidence shows that women have particularly strong preferences for cycle infrastructure fully separated from motor traffic.”

The study has been published by the peer-reviewed academic journal Transport Reviews

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How much does it really cost to run a car?

More than you think, that’s how much. During the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich published Energy and Equity, a polemic that demonstrated that having to work a certain number of hours each week to pay for an expensive form of transport was a calculation that can shock. This is a theme first explored in the 1850s, but was put so beautifully and intelligently by Illich. He is certainly worth quoting at length and below I do.

IvanIllichIllich also argued that apparent advances in speed were nothing of the sort, when other factors were taken into account. Fast cars weren’t as fast as they seemed because the costs to society and to the individual were far higher than ever appreciated. I was reminded of all this by a lovely conversation I had last night with Robert “Bicycle Bob” Silverman. He was one of the co-founders of Le Monde à Bicyclette, one of the world’s most influential cycle advocacy groups. Many of the campaign tactics used by advocacy groups today – such as die-ins, the carrying of bicycle-shaped oversize packages on trains and buses that don’t carry bicycles, and the riding of bicycles with plywood “skirts” to show the space taken up by cars – originated with “MAB”. Montreal now has 600kms of bike lanes, including a fully-separated cycleway that goes through the CBD, and bikes have access to certain bridges and are carried on public transit. How much of this was down to MAB? Almost all of it (well, that and Montreal’s relatively left-leaning culture). Toronto is famously unfriendly to cyclists – mayor Rob Ford didn’t have to try too hard to convince local politicians to enact anti-bicycle measures – and part of the reason is because it didn’t have MAB. (I’m not saying Montreal has perfect cycle infrastructure, it doesn’t and some of it is bi-directional, but it has more cycleways than most other North American cities.)

I was talking to Robert for the start of my research for Bike Boom. The crowdfunding for this went live on Kickstarter yesterday and is three-quarters of the way to my target of £6000. (Thanks to the 120 kind people who have backed it so far.)

Ivan Illich is a hero of mine and, so it turned out, he’s a hero to Robert as well. Illich died in 2002. I never got to meet him or see him talk, but Robert did. They corresponded, too. Illich was a key figure to those in the anarchist anti-car movements of the 1970s. Energy and Equity was a standard text for them. But Illich wasn’t just a cult hero to the middle class counter-culture crowd he was also mainstream enough to be supported by the bicycle industry. The PR company working for the Bicycle Association of Great Britain organised a UK speaking tour for Illich and it also paid for 1000 copies of Illich’s pamphlet which it distributed to MPs, county and city councils and other parts of the establishment.

The full text of Energy and Equity is available online but here’s an extended edited extract from this often-quoted polemic:

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The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel — probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions — finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man’s radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

Street Space For 60 People: Car, Bus, Bicycle

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.

Cycling is one of the key solutions to unsnarling cities, says major new OECD report

metropolitan century

According to a major new report from the OECD, walking and cycling will have to play a larger part in the megacities of the future, or those cities may cease to function. The Metropolitan Century, from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, is sub-titled “Understanding Urbanisation and its Consequences” and was published last week.

The report starts: “Urbanisation is progressing as fast as never before in history … Policy makers in every country face the task to maximise the benefits of urbanisation while minimising its downsides.”

One of the downsides is unfettered access to the central business district by private motor cars therefore the OECD says it is “important to adjust taxes and fees so that the negative consequences of driving into cities are reflected in the cost of car use.”

Urban sprawl accelerated by those who, in the last century, choose to drive almost everywhere is something politicians and planners should fix, believes the OECD report: ” … getting cities right is not only of vital importance for city residents and the countries where the cities develop, but for all of humanity.”

Heady stuff.

The report adds, “Liveable metropolises in the 21st century … look like this … walking and biking are safe and agreeable.” The report stresses that “private car ownership is both unnecessary and expensive …” and that the storage of private property on expensive real estate is economically illiterate, “public space is too valuable to be used for parking at subsidised rates that do not take into account all of the negative externalities.”

The OECD likes what it has seen of bike share schemes, such as Velib in Paris and the “Boris bikes” in London:

“Another innovative solution to urban traffic is bicycle sharing schemes that have been [adopted] in many cities around the world in recent years … Paris has approximately 20 000 bicycles distributed over more than 1 200 stations throughout the city. They are used for more than 30 million rides per year. Bicycle sharing schemes offer a fast and flexible transport option that can substitute cars for short trips. Perhaps more importantly, they also offer an uncomplicated way to start cycling for people who have not done so before. Thereby, they can contribute to an increased acceptance of cycling and help to initiate a broader shift towards it.”

The OECD is no lentil-chewing sandal-wearing eco-grouping it is an international economic organisation of 34 countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade.

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All Change to Bikes, 1975

Make Way For The Bike, New Scientist, 4th June 1981

Why hasn’t the UK got Dutch-style cycle networks in every town, city and village? Partly it’s down to culture: the Netherlands has had 100+ years of bicycle-based national identification. This is so strong that the Dutch bike – the omafiets, or granny bike, a Dutch national icon – is deemed to be peculiar to the Netherlands when, in fact, it’s English. Because the bicycle was adopted as a symbol of Dutch national identity from about 1910 it was far easier for politicians and planners to pay for and design bicycle path networks when, in the 1970s, there was a groundswell of support to rein back the car, which was starting to clutter up Dutch cities.

The current call from many British cycle campaigners to ‘Go Dutch’ echoes similar calls from cycle campaigners in the 1970s

All Change to Bikes, 1975 - click to enlarge
All Change to Bikes, 1975 – click to enlarge
The oil crisis of 1973 sent shockwaves around the world. Use of cars dropped; use of bicycles rose. There was a boom in bike sales in the early 1970s – from a low point of selling just 164,000 adult bicycles at the end of the 1960s the market jumped to 600,000 sales a year by the mid-1970s.

In the Netherlands, recognition that reliance on Middle Eastern oil was not sustainable resulted in a metric ton of cycleways to make an already bike-mad nation into an even bikier one. In the UK there was the same desire for change, the same desire to seize the moment and rein back the car. As we all know, not a lot changed.

But it wasn’t for the want of trying. All Change to Bikes was an umbrella initiative aimed at getting UK planners and politicians to see what their counterparts in the Netherlands had seen. The organisations signed up to the joint aims of All Change to Bikes included CTC, the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the Civic Trust, the trade and industry’s British Cycling Bureau, and the British Cycling Federation, and others. All Change to Bikes was run by Friends of the Earth, and some of those involved in the campaign went on to other roles in cycle advocacy, here and in the US.

The aims included the desire to “reallocate existing road space to create priority routes by local authorities for cyclists and pedestrians” and there should be a “network of priority routes linking all destinations (e.g. schools, shops, offices, factories and places of entertainment) and access to the countryside.”

Some people may be surprised to find CTC on that list of subscribing bodies. There’s a belief in some quarters that CTC has always opposed any form of “segregation” of bicycles from motor traffic. This is not wholly the case and CTC’s policy documents demonstrate the actual official views. In the 1970s, Stevenage’s Dutch-style cycleways system changed the CTC’s mind on segregation. Policy document after policy document show that the CTC actively welcomed and applauded the cycleways work done by Eric Claxton, chief designer of this New Town.

CTC urged other towns and cities to follow suit. Peterborough, Cambridge, Nottingham and Portsmouth trialled some Claxton-style cycleways, but not enough were put in place to make much difference.

Cyclists Today 1970s.002

Despite CTC’s championing of “cycleways” and other Dutch-style interventions, the UK’s car-centric planners and politicians went out of their way to ignore the use of bicycles. In a 1981 article in New Scientist, Mick Hamer used the example of the Netherlands to show what we, in Britain, were missing. Hamer, author of Wheels Within Wheels of 1974, an examination of the motor lobby’s caustic influence on British politics, was effusive in his praise of Dutch cycleways but, clearly, his editors at New Scientist weren’t so convinced. “For years, cyclists have been telling us they need cycle tracks,” wrote the New Scientist editors, but then went on to list the standard perceived evils perpetrated by cyclists, including riding on pavements (the magazine, in passing and with no comment, admitted drivers were guilty of this sin, too).

NewScientist1981Editorial.003

Hamer’s article is a read-it-and-weep one because it could have been written yesterday. Click to read it in full.

New Scientist 4 June 1981

New Scientist 4 June 1981

The history of cycle advocacy from the 1970s until today will be the subject of my new book, Bike Boom.

Bike Book, front and back cover plus spine

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The Kickstarter for Bike Boom runs until March 17th 2016. Please consider pledging for first-edition rewards and more.

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Bike Boom – the book

The Kickstarter for my new book – Bike Boom – has gone live.

Bike Book, front and back cover plus spine

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