Women shun cycling because of safety, not helmet hair
It will come as little surprise to anyone who cycles that twice as many men as women ride their bikes at least once a week, according to research from Sustrans, the cycling and walking charity. Almost three-quarters of women living in seven major UK cities never cycle for local journeys, the study found. Despite this, over two-thirds said their home town would be a better place if more people pedalled. Some 76% of women who already cycled or wanted to start said segregated lanes would help them to cycle more.
As a woman who cycles, I am often asked why so few others follow suit. Is it because of helmet hair? Or the bottom-amplifying effects of Lycra? There’s no doubt that women generally feel more pressure to look presentable than men. And although I’m rarely troubled by saddle sores, I find the logistics of cycling to work a right pain in the bum: the skanky showers, the outfit changes, the struggle to find somewhere discreet to plug in a hairdryer. And yes, I know that everyone in the Netherlands rides in their ordinary clothes, but I live in Stockport and work in Manchester: would you like to sit next to me unwashed after I’ve ridden 10 miles?
The main reason most women don’t cycle in the UK is because they think it is dangerous. You can tell them until the cows come home that the roads are statistically safe, and that you are more likely to be killed walking than on a bicycle. But when they sit on the top deck of a bus and look down to see a cyclist squashed up against the kerb they feel no compulsion whatsoever to join them. Women do seem to be more vulnerable, perhaps because they are often more reluctant to “own” the lane and so end up in the gutter: 10 amp;#xa0;out of 13 cyclists killed in London in 2009 were women, and eight of them were killed by left-turning HGVs, according to the campaign group Cycling UK.
Xavier Brice, at Sustrans, believes city planners are to blame. “Fiftyone per cent of the UK population is female, yet most of our cities are failing to design roads and streets for women to cycle,” he says. It cannot help that women remain under-represented among the transport planners and engineers who design our streets. And most council leaders, who decide how to spend the transport budget, are men.
Take Manchester, which has been ruled for more than 20 years by Richard Leese, the council leader. He cycles but was always lukewarm on segregated cycle lanes, say local campaigners. His view, they say, was that smoother tarmac was the answer: if only they could find the cash to fill in all the potholes then more people would saddle up. When new infrastructure was proposed he was against it if it threatened traffic flows.
Recently Leese has changed his tune: a nasty scare after getting his wheel stuck in the tram tracks may or may not have sped up his conversion. He now has an Olympic champion on his case too, after Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s mayor, appointed Chris Boardman to be its first cycling and walking commissioner. In his first interview after getting the job last year Boardman told me even he no longer felt safe riding on UK streets. Now we have a developing network of segregated lanes in Greater Manchester, with Boardman due to announce more by the end of the month. I amp;#xa0;regularly ride along one of them, which goes through the university and hospital districts, and am often struck by how many women I see. On Tuesday I took a Mobike to interview students at Manchester Met and was pleased to see a nurse fly by in her blue uniform, perhaps late for a shift at the infirmary.
Until very recently I took a slightly quicker route home, bombing along main roads. Then I got knocked off by someone who didn’t bother looking before he opened his door. I was unhurt, and will not appear in the cycling safety statistics. But when women tell me cycling is too dangerous I can’t, in good conscience, persuade them otherwise.
• Helen Pidd is the Guardian’s North of England editor