WABA Quick Release

Posts Tagged ‘women’s cycling’

This post is part of WABA’s Women on Bikes program, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources, and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes. To read about the project so far, click here to check out the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here.

By Kiera Zitelman & Laura Jean Shane, WABA’s Women’s Bicycling Interns 

WABA is proud to introduce our new Women’s Bicycling Outreach and Advocacy campaign, Women on Bikes.

It’s a fact: Women in our region bike less than men. We learned from the Women’s Forum last winter that WABA needs to step up and do something about it. So we’ve been hard at work developing a plan. With spring in the air and bike month on the way, now is the time to get moving. Now is the time to bring together the women in your life that say, “I’m interested in biking , but…”

Women on Bikes is WABA’s new approach to women’s bike outreach and for this to work we need your help. Our goal is to help women who bike for recreation/fitness to become transportational bicyclists and we plan to do it by bringing women together. We want to reach out to you, your best friend, your aunt, your co-worker, your favorite women of all ages and experience levels–whether they already bike or have only thought about biking.  We’re asking you to become our Bike SpokesWomen. To us, a Bike SpokesWoman is a bicyclist who sees the benefits of more women on bikes and wants to step up and help make it happen.

This campaign will truly be only as successful as our ability to get new faces in the room or in the bike lanes! That’s where Bike SpokesWomen come in. You can be a bike buddy and mentor, and you can turn a recreational rider into a city rider by bringing her along for the ride to our events and to bike rides and outings throughout the region.

How to Get Involved

So we’re asking two favors of you, our Bike SpokesWomen:

1. We need you to sign up for our email updates. You can do that here.
2. And we need you to bring one woman–just one!–to a Women on Bikes event. You can use our handy Tell-A-Friend tool to start the conversation.

The Women on Bikes campaign consists of educational meet-ups, bike classes, and friendly rides that will seek to address the concerns of new transportational bicyclists. These FREE events will present opportunities to turn the interested but concerned riders in your life into confident, effective street riders.

Women on Bikes Events

The action begins this weekend:

On Saturday, April 7th, we are hosting our first Women on Bikes Meet-up, a conversation about bikes. We want you—our friends and cyclists—to bring along a woman you know who wants to ride and who has questions and concerns. The event is designed to present useful information in a fun and social setting.

Sign up for Women on Bikes email updates to learn how to register for this and future events.

Become a BikeSpokesWomen now!

Then pass along the invitation.

Laura Jean Shane is a spring 2012 Women’s Bicycle Outreach & Advocacy Intern. She  came to WABA as a former sports medicine professional and current Masters of Public Health student at GWU. A devotee of RAGBRAI, she moved to DC last year and cannot imagine getting around any other way.

Kiera Zitelman is a spring 2012 Women’s Bicycle Outreach & Advocacy Intern. She has gotten around the DC area by bike for years since growing up in Silver Spring. As an environmental science and policy student at UMD, she uses her bike to navigate campus every day and ride the Anacostia Tributary trails near College Park on the weekends.

This post is part of the WABA Women Bicycling Project, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes.  To read about the project so far, check out Quick Release, the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here.

At long last, we are proud to present the audio recording of our Regional Women’s Forum, held last December.

WABA’s Women’s Forum Audio – December 12, 2011

This is the uncut audio from the event, and to help you identify the speakers, here is a list of the women who were on the panel:

Panel moderator

Jesse Cohn, WABA’s Women’s Bicycling  Advocacy & Outreach Intern

Panelists

Veronica Davis, Black Women Bike DC
Heather Deutsch, DDOT
Tracy Hadden-Loh, Rails-To-Trails
Ellen Jones, DC Bicycle Advisory Council
Katie Knight, Revolution Cycles
Finnuola Quinn, Alta Planning & Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling
Kate Ryan, WTOP news
Elizabeth Sherwood, BicycleSPACE
Katie Sihler, goDCgo

Sign up to receive emails about this project here.

Here at WABA, we are still thinking very much about this topic and the bigger questions it raises, as well as how it relates to the ideas that WABA talked about at our Regional Bike Summit in November. We will have some new projects here soon that will help further the conversation and keep the wheels turning. With that in mind, we would like to introduce our new Women’s Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach Interns: Keira Zitelman and Laura Jean Shane! We are very happy to have them both and we will have more details on their projects for the spring in the coming weeks.

One idea that came up again and again during the planning for the forum and afterwards was that this is not a gender-based problem. There is a large proportion of the general public (as high as 60%) who define themselves as “interested in cycling” but with significant reservations–about safety, about buying a bike, about infrastructure, about sweatiness and showers–and this group includes men and women, the old and the young, and people of every description and demographic.

These are the people who are on the cusp of taking up cycling for transportation, and at the core of our Women’s Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach project is the desire to determine what an organization with WABA’s reach and resources can do to convince women (and men) to take the plunge.

You can join the conversation by signing up to receive emails about our Women’s Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach project and by posting on this thread on the Washington Area Bike Forum.

National Bike Summit Event Roundup

When this year’s National Bike Summit participants roll into town, DC is going to be a hub for bike-related socializing. WABA encourages you to attend some of the fun (FREE) events surrounding the Summit.

If you haven’t signed up for the Summit yet, don’t worry! There’s still plenty of time. Online registration is closed but you can register on-site at the Grand Hyatt on Tuesday, the 20th at 1:30pm. Click here for more information.

Tuesday

1:00pm Tim Johnson’s Ride on Washington
Join Cyclocross superstar Tim Johnson for the last leg of his bike advocacy fundraising tour. Tim and his group started in Boston, but you can join him in DC.

2:00pm First-Ever National Women’s Cycling Forum
Women across the US bike at much lower rates than men. Come explore the issues and discuss ways to encourage  the ladies in your life to get on bikes (Co-hosted by the Alliance for Biking and Walking and the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals).

Wednesday

6:00pm Women’s Cycling Social
Come mingle with the women who are making waves in the active transportation world at BusBoys and Poets (Co-hosted by the Alliance for Biking and Walking and the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals).

6:00pm For your Disapproval Ride
Join local shop, BicycleSPACE, for a group ride to the BikeSnobNYC book-signing of his latest, ever-so-cynical gem: The Enlightened Cyclist (Check out the trailer).

Friday

9:30am-11:00am Congressional Bike Ride
Take the morning off,  jump on your bike, and meet up with hundreds of bike advocates throughout the country for the Summit’s final hoorah hosted by WABA. We’ll tour new bike infrastructure and you’ll make some new friends.

Know of anything else going on, organizing a ride or a happy hour? Share your NBS events in the comment feed.  And don’t forget to share your experiences on Twitter using the Summit’s hashtag: #NBS12

This post is part of the WABA Women Bicycling Project, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes.  To read about the project so far, check out Quick Release, the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here.

On December 12th, WABA hosted its first Women’s Bicycling Forum at the West End Library, bringing together nine women with varying professional and personal histories to talk about the gender gap in bicycling. More than 75 people RSVPed for the event and we had a packed house. The attendees were primarily women, but there were several men in the crowd as well.

The panelists included prominent women in the local and national bicycling community, among them Katie Sihler of goDCgo, Elizabeth Sherwood from BicycleSPACE, Tracy Hadden-Loh of Rails-To-Trails, Heather Deutsch from DDOT, Ellen Jones from the DC Bicycle Advisory Council, Veronica Davis of Black Women Bike DC, Kate Ryan of WTOP news, Katie Knight from Revolution Cycles, and Finnuola Quinn of Alta Planning and Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling. WABA’s Women’s Bicycling Outreach and Advocacy Intern Jesse Cohn moderated the panel and kept everything moving.

The conversation began with a focus on perception and the need to portray the bicycling community as more inclusive–by including diverse ages, ethnicities and genders in outreach and promotional materials and by complementing images of athletes and racers with those of more casual users, a wider variety of people can better identify with bicycling and bicyclists.  From there, we discussed bicycle shops and the roles they play in encouraging and discouraging women to ride. Overall, the evening’s discussion indicated that more women (and people, for that matter) will ride if bicycling is depicted as easy, affordable and fun. Providing basic information about what kind of bikes are best for different types of riders as well as how to securely lock a bike are important steps in achieving this “easy, affordable and fun” goal.

Throughout the evening it became clear that the personal backgrounds and anecdotal experience of these women–growing up in DC, being a mother, having been a bike shop customer and bicycle rider–factored heavily into the conversation. The sharing of these experiences was invaluable to the discussion, as they allowed other panelists and audience members to find commonalities in the barriers they’ve faced and let to the sharing of effective ways they have individually overcome these obstacles.

The WABA Women’s Bicycling Forum was a big success, but it is just the beginning of the conversation. The event raised awareness of the gender gap in bicycling and generated several constructive ideas as to how organizations like WABA and individuals like you can work to erase this discrepancy. We are brainstorming what the next steps should be, and we definitely want your input. If you haven’t already, please take a moment to complete the online Women’s Forum Worksheet. Or, if you have other ideas for what WABA can do, send us an email.

Ultimately, the event was a reminder to women who bicycle (or are thinking about bicycling) that we have a local network of peers–women who have experienced the same issues and faced the same challenges–who are ready and willing to help out.

Our sincere thanks to all of the women who participated on the panel on Monday night as well as all of the attendees. We hope you enjoyed yourselves and we look forward to speaking with you all as the conversation moves forward. In the coming months and years, more women will ride in DC because of you.

Lastly, big thank you to our sound system providers for the evening, ESP sound:
http://www.espsound.com

Twitter coverage of WABA’s Women’s Forum:

You can read our live tweets from Monday night and contribute to the conversation on twitter by searching for the hashtag #womenbikedc

Press and blog coverage of WABA’s Women’s Forum:

Zanna Worzella of Bike Arlington writing for the Commuter Page Blog:
http://www.commuterpageblog.com/2011/12/women-on-bikesare-they-out-there.html

Anne Factor on the goDCgo blog:
http://blog.godcgo.com/?p=113

Carolyn Szczepanski on the Alliance for Biking and Walking Blog:
http://www.peoplepoweredmovement.org/site/index.php/site/blog/3888/

John Hendel on the TBD On Foot Blog:
http://www.tbd.com/blogs/tbd-on-foot/2011/12/d-c-s-bicycling-gender-gap-begins-at-the-bike-shop-and-at-home-13926.html

ABC7 News:
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2011/12/women-address-gender-gap-in-cycling-community-70234.html

This post is part of the WABA Women Bicycling Project, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes.  To read about the project so far, check out Quick Release, the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here.

 

My mother recalls the great honor of being brought by her father on the donkey and cart into Boyle for her first new bicycle. She rode nine miles back on the bicycle that was purchased for the huge sum of ten pounds specifically so she could bypass the local national school and attend the better school further away. A generation earlier, a bicycle had been similarly bought for her mother so that she too could have access to better schooling. Those Raleigh and Royal Enfield bicycles allowed them to travel the Roscommon roads widely, riding between the hedgerows and small fields that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. My mother talks of happy times riding with her sisters and collecting other girls en route to school in Elphin five miles away. Before the bicycle, the women and girls of rural Ireland had never had this freedom of travel and the options that brought with it.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting atop a cushion tied with twine on the back of Granny’s bicycle, my arms tight around her waist as she cycled down to the village shop in Ballinameen. My mother remembers riding on the back of that same black bicycle from when she too was a child. It had a lamp and wicker basket on the front and a rear mud guard painted white for night visibility on the back. Granny kept it operational through the war years by sewing patches on the rubber tires. Even in the late stages in her life, it was without remark that this was how she continued to get around and it allowed her to live independently on the now quiet farm.

Meanwhile, my mother’s scholarships had led to her leaving Roscommon and taken her to a new life and family in Dublin. By eleven, I was biking the four miles to school in Rathmines as the CIE bus strikes that disrupted the city for weeks at a time caused everyone to find new ways around. The joke in Dublin was that CIE stood for “Cycling Is Easier”. I rode frequently throughout secondary school and then full-time though my college years. Dublin of the seventies and early eighties was a place where the postmen brought all the letters by bike and none of us had much extra money in our pockets. We had just enough to pay 50p to watch U2 play in the Dandelion Market and although I can’t remember specifically how I got there, I must have cycled. Cycling in Dublin was very social with constant running into pals who’d ride with you a bit of the way, chatting and catching up on the news.

So that is a piece of the story of my upbringing and of the women preceding me who cycled in their time and landscape. By now, I have been living another life for twenty years in the northern Virginia suburbs. As a civil engineer, it is very clear how the design and layout of this community plays a major role in my limited options to get around under my own steam. When I can, I hop on my bike for local trips and I have the satisfaction of working to help create the infrastructure to enable such rides. However, in my suburban life, that most ordinary activity to get around is barely considered as an option. It’s also a pretty lonely act and I get excited to see anyone who even looks vaguely like me on a bicycle.

Education, bicycling and women have been inextricably linked since the earliest days of bicycles, paving the way to independence and choices for girls. While I apply my engineering background to design of facilities, I give a piece of the credit for the necessary education to the bicycles that run through my maternal lineage.

Fionnuala Quinn is a licensed civil engineer with over eleven years of engineering experience on environmental and land development projects. She has spent an additional five years advocating on road safety design issues. Her recent work focused on bicycle advocacy through commenting on proposed engineering projects. Fionnuala served as the manager of the Women Cycling Project, which included an on-line survey, webinar, project webpages, and reports. She is also the Vice Chair for Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling (FABB) and was the recipient of WABA’s 2011 Advocacy Award.

Event Details

When:
Monday, December 12th
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Where:
Large Meeting Room
DC Public Library, West End location
1101 24th St. NW

Sign up here to attend and observe the Forum. Space is limited!

Before the Event

If you would like to tell your story, you can fill out our Women’s Bicycling Forum Worksheet, and bring it with you to the Forum and your words will be included in the final project report. If you cannot attend the Forum, or would like to do things paperlessly, we have an online version of the Worksheet.

This post is part of the WABA Women Bicycling Project, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes.  To read about the project so far, check out Quick Release, the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here.

 

My name is Jesse Cohn, I am currently the Women’s Outreach and Advocacy Intern at WABA, and I am both a woman and an avid cyclist. I ride for transportation and for exercise, and often just to explore. Completing two cross-country trips in the past four years, I have ridden over 10,000 miles in my lifetime. And while this means that I know a lot about what it means to be a woman bicyclist, there is still a lot that I didn’t know before coming into this position.

I have experienced few barriers to bicycling, as I am a fit, fearless, single, childless woman. I live a mile from where I work and only a few blocks from my local supermarket. I have a lot of experience riding a bicycle in a city. I don’t need to dress up for work, I am lucky enough to have access to showers and indoor bicycle parking in my office, and the weather has been surprisingly agreeable since I moved to Washington in September. Oh, and I already own a bicycle and a helmet.

So while I came into this position with some expectations of the barriers women find to riding in DC, I had very little experience with challenging and overcoming them.  I began this project by researching what had already been done to promote women cycling around the country. I found several disparate efforts–scattered “women’s only” rides and events–as many places had, similarly to DC, just recently begun to investigate this gender gap. I conceived of the Women’s Bicycling Forum as a way to jumpstart a conversation about this huge topic, bringing together a group of women to discuss the barriers and brainstorm the solutions.

The Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals formed the Women’s Cycling Project to generate discussion and share approaches to encourage more women and girls to bicycle for everyday transportation. The conversation has started on the national level, but it hasn’t yet been comprehensively or publicly addressed in our region. That is my job. Not daunting at all, right?

I’ve spent the past few months reaching out to different local women involved in transportation to learn their perspective on cycling in the region. In each conversation I heard personal barriers and frustrations to riding locally, as well as potential solutions to overcoming these barriers. While many of these conversations struck similar chords, each of them brought unique perspectives to the broader discussion of women and bicycling.

My conversations with these women have been invaluable and I respect them all immensely. They come from varying  professional backgrounds–working in planning, advocacy, policy, and bicycle shops, just to name a few–and I am eager to see them discuss these issues and their solutions with one another at the Women’s Bicycling Forum. I am extremely grateful to them for agreeing to participate and for bringing their perspectives and their stories to share with all of you.

This meeting of the minds is a first step towards increasing the number of women who chose to cycle in the region. Not only will the Women’s Bicycling Forum produce recommendations for WABA to increase female ridership, but this project has also brought the issue of the  bicycling gender gap into each of the separate corners of the transportation world where each of these women work. Hopefully, it will also give people the chance to get their questions answered and maybe, just maybe, it will be the bicycling catalyst for a few people to start riding.

I hope you are all as excited for the Women’s Bicycling Forum as I am, and I hope to see you there!

Event Details

When:
Monday, December 12th
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Where:
Large Meeting Room
DC Public Library, West End location
1101 24th St. NW

Sign up here to attend and observe the Forum. Space is limited!

Before the Event

If you would like to tell your story, you can fill out our Women’s Bicycling Forum Worksheet, and bring it with you to the Forum and your words will be included in the final project report. If you cannot attend the Forum, or would like to do things paperlessly, we have an online version of the Worksheet.

This post is part of the WABA Women Bicycling Project, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes.  To read about the project so far, check out Quick Release, the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here.

Sign up here to attend and observe the Forum. Space is limited!

Across the country, there is a significant gender gap in bicycling. Men are three times more likely to ride than women. Though this gap is smaller in the DC metro area, there are still many more men cycling in the region than women. Why is this? What causes this disparity and what can and should be done to change it?

WABA invites you to observe its first Women’s Cycling Forum on December 12th at the West End Public Library. At this roundtable discussion, a panel of women from all corners of the local bicycling arena will share their ideas and solutions as to how to increase cycling in the DC metro area.

Women on the panel include advocates, writers, city and trail professionals, activists, journalists and businesswomen. All of them are bicyclists and want to see more women on bikes.

The goal of this conversation is to produce executable recommendations that utilize WABA’s reach and resources to get more women riding more often. The event is open to the public to observe the discussion.

Event Details

When:
Monday, December 12th
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Where:
Large Meeting Room
DC Public Library, West End location
1101 24th St. NW

Sign up here to attend and observe the Forum. Space is limited!

Before the Event

If you would like to tell your story, you can fill out our Women’s Bicycling Forum Worksheet, and bring it with you to the Forum and your words will be included in the final project report. If you cannot attend the Forum, or would like to do things paperlessly, we have an online version of the Worksheet.

Additionally, we’ve compiled a collection of articles that have explored issues and concepts related to women and bicycling. Please feel free to pass them along to anyone else who might be interested in them:

“New Series #Girlbikegangs: How Women are Changing US Cycling”
The Bird Wheel

“Women Cycling Survey; Analysis of Results”
Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals (APBP)

“Bicycling’s Gender Gap: It’s the Economy, Stupid”
Grist

“What Women Want: A Women’s Perspective on Cycling”
Momentum Magazine

“Black Women Take Their Place in DC Bike Lanes”
The Washington Post

“Demystifying NYC’s Cycling Gender Gap”
StreetsBlog

“To Close the Gender Gap, Separate Cyclists from Cars”
StreetsBlog

“Number of Female Cyclists Lags in New York with Safety as a Concern”
New York Times

“What’s British Cycling Doing for Women?”
British Cycling

“Bike vs. Bike: Cycle Chic Debate”
Momentum Magazine

“Sex and the City – and Cycling”
Cycling Mobility

Cycling Sisters
This is a women’s cycling group whose mission is to increase the number of women who ride bicycles for transportation, and to increase the confidence and comfort of women cyclists.

“Media Articles on Women’s Cycling”
Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals (APBP)
This is a great resource with several compelling articles.

WABA is looking for two interns for this fall. Both internships will involve improving our advocacy and outreach capacity to specific underserved communities of cyclists. These positions are unpaid, but WABA is happy to work with local colleges and universities to provide course credit to any student looking for experience in transportation/bicycle advocacy or community outreach and organizing.

Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach Intern – Spanish Language

Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach Intern – Women’s Cycling

Applying is easy, just send your cover letter and resume to jobs@waba.org and we’ll be in touch!