Women Ride In Copenhagen. Why Not Here?

In an earlier post, I wrote about how women's greater propensity for obeying the law--or simply our risk-adverseness--actually puts us at greater risk of injury and death while cycling.

In that post, I wrote about how the "Idaho Stop" could help to close that "gap."  Briefly, the "Idaho Stop"--so named because the Gem State legalized it all the way back in 1982--allows cyclists to treat red lights like "Stop" signs and "Stop" signs like "Yield" signs.  In other words, cyclists can proceed through a red light if there is no cross-traffic in the intersection.  That allows cyclists to proceed through the intersection ahead of any traffic--including right-turning trucks and buses--that might be following them.

I got to thinking about that in reading Cara Eckholm's comparison of bicycle commuting in Copenhagen, where she spent her early twenties, and New York, where she currently resides.  She points out that in the Danish capital, female cyclists actually outnumber their male counterparts, but on the Big Apple streets, men outnumber women on bikes by a factor of three to one, even though women outnumber men in "spin" and other indoor cycling.

Some of that difference, she contends, has to do with the state of bicycle infrastructure in each city (and country).  Studies show that women's participation in cycling tends to increase when there are more protected lanes and other cycling infrastructure. But she also believes that the cultural norms around gender and cycling are perhaps more important.  As an example, she cites reports--and I can attest--that drivers are more likely to encroach on a female cyclist's space that that of a male rider's.  

Moreover, women are far more likely to be using their bikes to ferry their children to school or ballet or soccer practice, or to shop or do household errands, than men are.  For such riding and riders, the monocoque carbon frames and spandex riding outfits featured in most ad and p.r. campaigns aren't very practical.  Eckholm contends that showing women--whether on city, cargo or e-bikes--in non-bike clothing with their kids, groceries, books or other items that don't fit in a jersey pocket would probably encourage more women--and members of racial and ethnic minorities--to think, "Hey, I can ride a bike!"

Illustration of "New Woman" by F. Opper in Puck magazine, 1895.  From the Library of Congress.

That is more or less the image cycling has in places like Copenhagen.  And, ironically, it harkens back to the images of the 1890s that showed proud, confident women in their "bloomers" and derby hats astride two wheels.  

Davis: Still Trying To Set People On The Path Of Cycling

"It was Portland before Portland was Portland."

That is how someone described Davis, California for me. 

 Today, when you ask people to name a "bicycle-friendly", they are likely to think of the City of Roses.  I will not quibble with its reputation:  Few American cities have done more to promote bicycling as a viable means of transportation (though, as in most places, some of those efforts have been misguided).  Portlanders adopted their first bike plan in 1973; after meeting its goals, which included 190 miles of bike paths, new bike plans followed in 1996 and 2010.

It should be pointed out, however, that Davis was developing a reputation as a bicycle haven as early as the 1950's, at a time when few American adults cycled--and Portland was still a lumber-and-mining town.  (When Bill Walton arrived to play with the Trailblazers, the local NBA team, he was dismayed to find a "redneck" burg.)  The local agricultural college had just become the University of California-Davis (UC's seventh campus); the city's flat terrain and warm climate as well as enthusiasm over a new educational project attracted a diverse group of people who were willing, well, to try something new.  

According to local lore, the real driving (pun intended!) force behind the city's pro-bike efforts were a family who returned from a year in the Netherlands in the early 1960s.  They found sympathetic ears in a newly-elected city council that, no doubt, saw bicycling as a way to promote their city as well as the new UC campus. In 1967, Davis striped what were claimed to be the first bicycle-specific lanes in the US.  

Other efforts and experiments soon followed, which included facilities  and ways of accommodating bicycles at traffic signals.   The university invented the bicycle roundabout, now used on many other schools, to handle the large number of bicycles on campus.  Today, the city of ten  square miles boasts 50 miles of on-street bike lanes the same amount of off-street bike paths.

Even after other cities have ramped up their efforts to make themselves more appealing to cyclists, Davis is still seen as a cyclist's paradise--at least, in comparison to other American locales.  A far higher percentage of its citizens cycle to work or school every day than in almost any other city of its population (67,666, according to a 2015 estimate).  Still, Susan L. Handy muses, "Perhaps even more interesting than the fact that so many people in Davis cycle is the fact that so many more don't."

Professor Handy is the Chair of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC-Davis.  She is also Director of the Sustainable Transportation Center, part of the Federal University Transportation Centers Program.  She is probably  in as good a position as anyone can be to understand patterns of bicycle usage--and, more important, what might be behind those patterns.

She also uses what is, arguably, some of the best bicycle infrastructure in the United States. Still, she says it is not enough.  "[W]hile good infrastructure is necessary to get many people bicycling, it is not enough to get most people bicycling".  The experience of Davis would seem to bear this out:  Although a higher percentage of Davis workers ride their bikes to their jobs than their colleagues even in nearby Berkeley (home to another UC campus)  or Palo Alto (Stanford University), or in other campus towns like Ithaca, New York (Cornell University)  and Boulder, Colorado, the number for Professor Handy's hometown is still only 15 percent.  

Still more telling, a similar percentage of children cycle to their soccer games, even though most don't have to go very far.  

According to Professor Handy's research, whether or not children cycle to their soccer games is influenced by whether or not their parents also ride.  Ditto for whether or not they--or their older siblings who attend high school--ride their bikes to classes.  Of course, as in most places, whether or not kids ride to their high schools is also a function of whether or not they have drivers' licenses or access to automobiles.

Interestingly, according to the research, friends' and peers' attitudes about cycling have little or no effect on whether kids or teenagers ride to school or their soccer games.  Based on my own admittedly informal observations, I would say the same for whether or not adults ride their bikes to work.

Another factors that  helps to depress the numbers of cyclists who ride to school or work is the perception of safety:  People often express fear of traffic, crime or other factors.  (I often hear such anxieties expressed here in New York.) Perhaps not surprisingly, women express these fears more than men do.  And then there are those who simply don't like to ride bikes.

Nobody seems to know how to influence that last category. (I failed with a spouse and a couple of romantic partners!) They, like those who come from families who don't ride or worry about their safety, are not pedaling to work because of their attitudes about cycling.  And, as Professor Handy says, attitudes are even more important than infrastructure in getting people to forsake the steering wheel and grab a handlebar.

If there is anything discouraging about Professor Handy's conclusions, it is this:  She came to them in one of the few places in the United States with two generations' worth of "cycling memory", if you will.  In most other places in this country, most drivers have little or no idea of how to act around cyclists because they haven't ridden a bike  on a street, for transportation or other utilitarian purposes, since they were children--if indeed they even rode then.  In much of Europe, by contrast, far greater numbers of drivers are still cyclists, or have ridden recently in their lives.  And they are more likely to have come from families with at least one member who regularly cycled.  

I offer myself as an example:  I am the first--and, to date, only-- member of my family to regularly ride a bike beyond the age at which I could hold a drivers' license.  (I am also the first to do a number of other things, such as earn a high school diploma and college degree, and to do things that are the subject of my other blog!)   But I am an anomaly:    I simply found that I enjoyed riding and never lost that love.  I rode, even with a complete lack of infrastructure , very little cycling culture and few peers who rode. And I continue to ride. On the other hand, I have never been successful at enticing anyone to ride who wasn't already inclined to do so. The complaints and excuses were the same then as the ones I hear now.  

As Professor Handy points out, the real challenge is to change those attitudes--if they can indeed be changed.  She seems to think it possible.

Why Do--And Don't--Women Ride?

In late 2014, People for Bikes commissioned a study on women's participation in cycling.

Its findings confirmed some things I'd suspected but revealed other things that surprised me.

My own experiences and observations have shown me that more males than females cycle.  According to the study, 45 million women ride a bicycle at least once a year, compared to 59 million men.  In other words, about 43 percent of all adult cyclists are women.  Given what I've seen, I'm not surprised by those statistics. 

Nor am I surprised by another PfB finding, interesting as it is:  Boys and girls ride bikes at the same rate at ages three to nine.  At ten years of age, girls and women start to ride less than men and boys. The gap grows as they grow older, and is its widest at ages 55 and older.

That, in spite of something else the surveys revealed:  Almost the same numbers of women and men say they would like to bike more often.  One of the reasons women most commonly cite for not cycling is simply not having a working bicycle available at home.  This is a factor for somewhat higher of numbers of women than for men. 

Safety concerns are another deterrent to cycling for many women. While the numbers of women who worry about being struck by a car is roughly equal to the numbers of men who express such concerns, women are much more likely than men to cite fears about their own personal safety as a reason for not cycling.

One of the study's revelations that surprised me somewhat is that 94 percent of female cyclists rode for recreation while  68 percent rode for transportation to and from social and leisure activities.  Actually, I'm only somewhat surprised by the second figure, but more so by the first, based on my own observations and impressions here in New York City.

The most surprising part of the study (at least to me) is this:  A much higher percentage (31) of women with children than without (19) rode at least once a year.  Then again, the study found the same held true for men (46 vs. 31 percent).  These contradict a UCLA study that suggested women don't ride because they need their cars to handle childcare responsibilities. 

Knowing about the People for Bikes study leads me to wonder whether women's actual and perceived barriers to cycling can be overcome--and whether doing so would change the ways in which women ride.  If more women started to ride to work, and if more of us started to ride our bikes to social and other activities, would more women take up long-distance touring, racing and other genres of cycling in which the gap between women's and men's participation is even greater?