In this paper, we represent a systematic review of stated preference studies examining the extent to which cycle infrastructure preferences vary by gender and by age. A search of online, English-language academic and policy literature was followed by a three-stage screening process to identify relevant studies. We found 54 studies that investigated whether preferences for cycle infrastructure varied by gender and/or by age. Forty-four of these studies considered the extent of separation from motor traffic. The remainder of the studies covered diverse topics, including preferred winter maintenance methods and attitudes to cycle track lighting. We found that women reported stronger preferences than men for greater separation from motor traffic. There was weaker evidence of stronger preferences among older people. Differences in preferences were quantitative rather than qualitative; that is, preferences for separated infrastructure were stronger in some groups than in others, but no group preferred integration with motor traffic. Thus, in low-cycling countries seeking to increase cycling, this evidence suggests focusing on the stronger preferences of under-represented groups as a necessary element of universal design for cycling.
In low-cycling countries, cycling is not evenly distributed across genders and age groups. In the UK, men are twice as likely as women to cycle to work and cycling tends to be dominated by younger adults. By contrast, in higher cycling countries and cities, gender differences are low, absent, or in the opposite direction. Such places also lack the UK's steady decline in cycling among those aged over 35 years. Over the past fifteen years some UK local areas have seen increases in cycling. This paper analyses data from the English and Welsh Census 2001 and 2011 to examine whether such increases are associated with greater diversity among cyclists. We find that in areas where cycling has increased, there has been no increase in the representation of females, and a decrease in the representation of older adults. We discuss potential causes and policy implications. Importantly, simply increasing cycling modal share has not proved sufficient to create an inclusive cycling culture. The UK's culturally specific factors limiting female take-up of cycling seem to remain in place, even where cycling has gone up. Creating a mass cycling culture may require deliberately targeting infrastructure and policies towards currently under-represented groups.
1206 Philadelphians enrolled in the evaluation during 2015–2017 and completed an internet survey. Past 7-day work, transport, and leisure-time PA were collected. Participants were linked to their bikeshare trips in order to objectively assess program use.
Survey participants were 41% non-White; 33% lower-socio-economic status (‘disadvantaged’); main transportation mode was split between motor vehicle, public transit, and walking; 43% had never been on a personal bicycle in the city; and only 6% primarily traveled via bicycle. After excluding walking, 45% were insufficiently active (lower levels of moderate or vigorous PA based on minimum guidelines). Relative to others, those who were insufficiently active were disproportionately older, female, non-Hispanic Black and disadvantaged. Adjusted baseline results found much higher prevalence of insufficient activity among disadvantaged persons and persons primarily traveling via public transit or motor vehicle (relative to walking or cycling).
In this dissertation, I make three central claims. First, I argue that the advent and growing influence of what I term “Creative Class discourse” has persuaded the wealthy business and real estate actors that make up the growth coalition, and their allies in city hall, that bicycle friendly policies serve their interests. This discourse emphasizes the importance of attracting a highly-skilled workforce for sustaining economic growth, and the importance of lifestyle amenities in attracting such a workforce. Second, I argue that variation in the level of support from growth coalition actors, over time and between cities, explains both the general rise of bicycle friendly policies and variation between cities in their adoption. Third, I argue that the involvement of growth coalition actors in bicycle policymaking produces particular kinds of bicycle friendly policies: capital-intensive, place-making projects that offer profitpotential for developers. While these projects can create excitement and momentum for bicycling, they also create greater risk of gentrification and displacement than incremental, geographically dispersed projects. Greater integration of community organizations into bicycle advocacy reduces growth coalition involvement, resulting in policies that are more sensitive to gentrification concerns, but produce less dramatic transformations of the built environment and potentially less excitement for bicycling. I support these claims with a regression analysis of the adoption of bicycle friendly policies in 60 large US cities and analysis of interviews with participants in the bicycle politics of four case cities. My conclusions suggest that the political power of the growth coalition can be harnessed to environmental ends, but that the resulting policies risk disrupting the lives of poor, working-class, and racial minority urban residents if no provisions are made to avoid such harms.
Cycling rates have been increasing in Ireland over the last ten years, but there is a large difference in male and female participation – only about a quarter of cyclists on Irish roads are female. This paper combines the latest census data with geospatial cycle lane data to explore the drivers of the gender-cycling-gap across 238 electoral districts in Dublin, Ireland. Our core hypothesis is motivated by previous literature which suggests that differences in female risk aversion could partly explain the gap. To test this hypothesis, we explore if areas with safer cycling routes to the city centre have relatively stronger effects for females, controlling for a range of area geographic and demographic factors. Both male and female bicycle participation is negatively correlated with an area's distance to the city, share of apartments and average income, and positively correlated with education. Comparing results across genders shows that the gender-cycling-gap is due to relatively larger negative effects for distance, income and apartments for females, which is partly offset by stronger positive education effects. Routes with very high shares of separated or off-road lanes (top quartile) have significantly higher cycling rates. This effect, although stronger for females, is not statistically different across genders. We highlight a number of gender-based policy recommendations related to cycling infrastructure, bicycle storage and bicycle supports (electric bicycles).
The link between accessibility and social equity attracts much attention for promoting sustainability. However, there is no comprehensive approach to elevate the role of accessibility in evaluating transportation system over social equity by considering the variety of urban opportunities and population groups from green transportation perspective. Our goal is to develop such a framework to evaluate transportation equity by focusing on accessibility via transit and cycling. Applying the framework to Fresno, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio with different development patterns, we delineate service areas at block-group level with five time-thresholds. The service area is used to count the number of urban opportunities: jobs, dining, churches, libraries, parks, multi-use paths, schools. We then use statistical comparison and geographical mapping to identify accessibility gap to these opportunities between advantaged and disadvantaged groups defined by income, property value, education, vehicle ownership, race, and age. The results indicate the extent of differences in accessibility is sensitive to threshold specification of grouping population. The findings suggest that the efficiency of transit service needs to be improved to reach the same level of cycling, while they do help with the accessibility for economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Considering school enrollment, the accessibility to opportunities in Fresno performs differently while students in Cincinnati benefit from good accessibility to most resources. The results of accessibility to multi-use paths highlight the need of providing more efficient green transportation facilities for less wealthy neighborhoods. Variation in accessibility between groups underscores the importance of developing policies to meet the needs of diverse social groups.
Urban street space is increasingly contested. However, it is unclear what a fair street space allocation would look like. We develop a framework of ten ethical principles and three normative perspectives on street space – streets for transport, streets for sustainability, and streets as place – and discuss 14 derived street space allocation mechanisms. We contrast these ethically grounded allocation mechanisms with real-world allocation in 18 streets in Berlin. We find that car users, on average, had 3.5 times more space available than non-car users. While some allocation mechanisms are more plausible than others, none is without disputed normative implications. All of the ethical principles, however, suggest that on-street parking for cars is difficult to justify, and that cycling deserves more space. We argue that ethical principles should be systematically integrated into urban and transport planning.
Fairness and justice in transport provision, or the lack thereof, is a growing concern among both researchers and policy makers, and it is vital for transport planners and decision-makers to undertake measures to tackle such issues. Fairness in transportation is defined based on the concepts of both equality and equity. Unequal usage of transportation modes can be one of the results of inequitable transport systems or arise from populations’ different desires about using bicycles. Understanding the differences between the two aforementioned causes of unequal usage of bicycles and implementing appropriate cycling policies can increase bicycle usage, as well as provide an equitable cycling environment. Primarily, researchers have focused on solving inequality of usage issues related to public transportation, however, there are a number of studies, albeit limitedly that consider inequality in bicycle usage. The aim of this study is to, firstly, provide a better insight into conceptual differences between inequality of usage and inequity, and also to highlight the importance of analysing unequal usage of bicycles. Secondly, this study attempts to review inequalities in usage of bicycles, including private bicycles and bicycle sharing systems, in order to highlight the differences between usage behaviour of different population groups and communities. Finally, recommendations to reduce inequality of usage of bicycles are provided, to support better policy-making, and further research needs are highlighted.
Essential riders are individuals who rely on a bicycle as a primary, indispensable mode of transportation due to constraints on mobility. Legacies of uneven development and disproportionate wealth accumulation along race and class lines result in social, financial, or political barriers that restrict the mobility of essential riders. Responses to racially biased transportation planning practices call for equitable and meaningful participation from underrepresented communities. Equitable public participation necessitates local knowledge, or tacit information known to an individual through experience, as legitimate and valuable information in decision making processes. I collaborated with BikeAthens, a community bicycle organization, to listen to the experiences of essential riders in Athens-Clarke County, GA. While essential riders in Athens-Clarke County did not convey profound input for transportation planning purposes per se, their perceptions of navigating transportation networks made primarily for automobiles underscore the need to minimize negative impacts of transportation planning decisions on underrepresented communities.
In the context of an ageing global population, mobility experts are increasingly seeing cycling as a way to help people with disabilities move around cities independently. A bike can act as a “rolling walking stick”; yet looking at its owner you wouldn’t know they had a disability: around 40% of disabled cyclists simply use a regular two-wheeled bike.
For two out of three disabled cyclists, riding a bike is easier than walking, easing joint strain, aiding balance and relieving breathing difficulties. According to recent research by Transport for London, 78% of disabled people are able to cycle, while 15% sometimes use a bike to get around.
The paper presents a study to explore the relationship between travel poverty and social disadvantage at the local geographical level. The main aim of the research was to identify the extent to which the revealed travel behavioural outcomes of the study participants are due to personal social constraints or environmental conditions in their residential locations. Specifically, we sought to identify if the greater access to local amenities and public transport services of inner city residents led to an increase in their daily travel activities when compared with their urban peripheral counterparts. The research analysed data from a personal travel survey and one-day travel diary with 502 adults aged between 16 and 65 years in two different deprived areas in Merseyside, North West England. Our analysis is somewhat hampered by the small sample size, but the modelled results suggest that more trips, and longer journey distances do not necessarily imply greater social inclusion. The geographically weighted regression models (GWR) highlighted that the physical location of where people live within the city is more influential on their trip-making patterns than social determinants such as household income, age, gender, and/or employment status. Street connectivity, the level of bus services and neighbourhood safety were all particularly significant for determining spatial variations in the daily trips that were undertaken, with more trips being undertaken where there was a greater density of street nodes, bus stops and where people felt safer at night. This highlights the need for local transport and urban policymakers to carefully consider and target these micro-scale factors when attempting to introduce transport interventions to reduce social exclusion amongst low-income urban populations.
Transport poverty is an issue that has never fully captured the interests of the transport engineering profession in either the ‘global north’ or ‘global south’ and yet it is a problem that adversely affects the daily lives of millions of people across the globe. What precisely constitutes transport poverty is not adequately articulated within academic, policy or infrastructure design literature. This paper aims to demonstrate how the different ways that academic studies and policy programmes have defined and recorded the problem of transport poverty is directly related to the ways in which it has been subsequently addressed in practice. The overall impression is one of inadequacy, fragmentation, inconsistency and tokenistic treatment of an issue that potentially affects anywhere between 10 to 90% of all households, depending on which definition is used and which country is being considered. This suggests that it is a far greater problem than the transport profession has previously been prepared to recognise and one that requires its urgent attention given the continuing trends for mass migration, urbanisation and wealth concentration within and between the ‘global north’ and ‘global south’.
The globally distributed health impacts of environmental degradation and widening population inequalities require a fundamental shift in understandings of healthy urbanism – including policies and decisions that shape neighbourhood and building design. The built environment tends to disadvantage or exclude women, children, the elderly, disabled, poor and other groups, starting from design and planning stages through to occupation, and this results in avoidable health impacts. Although these concepts are not new, they are rapidly emerging as built environment research and practice priorities without clear understanding of the interconnected aims of healthy environments that are sustainable, equitable and inclusive. This article promotes a new framework – Towards Healthy uRbanism: InclusiVe Equitable Sustainable (THRIVES) – that extends previous conceptualisations and reorients focus towards the existential threat of environmental breakdown and the social injustice created through inequitable and exclusive urban governance and design processes and outcomes. The Framework was developed through synthesising knowledge from research and practice, and by testing this new conceptualisation in a participatory workshop. Ongoing research is exploring implementation of the Framework in practice. If widely adopted, this Framework may contribute towards achieving the goals of sustainable development through a focus on increasing human health and wellbeing in urban development.
In cities across the world, studies have shown that gender impacts the way people use transport systems, and the reason why they travel differently. Differences in how and why women and men travel differently, on average, are seen to be partially a matter of choice, and partially a matter of constraint. Furthermore, these differences are recognized as having significant consequences, especially for social and environmental sustainability. In a European context, gendered differences have been increasingly acknowledged as relevant for transport planners to consider in their planning processes. Transport planning, however, is a traditional discipline, where considering more social, ‘soft’, or qualitative elements may not come naturally. This thesis studies the intersection of transport and gender in Denmark. The Danish context is considered particularly interesting because of a found reluctance in Denmark towards issues of inequality and general discussions about feminism. Blackboxing is identified as a useful theory to describe and unpack transport planning processes, and the ways in which they standardize and simplify elements such as gender. A literature review results in the assumption that gender is being blackboxed in Danish transport planning, and leads to the research question, ‘to what extent and why is gender blackboxed in Danish transport planning?’ Interviews with ten Danish transport planners are utilized to gain insight into what elements of Danish transport planning are blackboxing gender, and why gender is blackboxed, according to the Danish transport planners. Elements of transport planning processes such as data collection, data analysis, and user group identification are pointed out as having many parts which blackbox gender, perhaps unbeknownst to the transport planners. Reasons given by the transport planners for a more active lack of consideration for gender include, a lack of knowledge about how to consider gender, obstructive elements of personal and national identity, and asymmetrical perceptions of their organizations’ roles. It is found that gender is blackboxed to a great extent, through various transport planning processes and for interrelated reasons.
Mobilities of care, the travel required to meet one and others’ household needs such as shopping, running errands, or escorting children, are often understood as difficult to complete by bicycle because they tend to involve transporting goods or people. Because women tend to complete more unpaid household labour than men, the bicycle’s assumed incompatibility with household-serving travel has been suggested as a possible explanation for the gender-gap in cycling within low-cycling cities. However, the ways in which people use the bicycle to complete this form of travel in low-cycling cities has yet to be studied. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with residents of Toronto, Canada, who are new to cycling, this paper addresses this knowledge gap by providing a detailed account of how cyclists use their bicycles to complete mobilities of care. Results indicate that traveling with children and grocery shopping in bulk is generally considered difficult by bicycle. Buying small amounts of groceries and trip-chaining, however, was usually perceived as convenient. This paper also frames participants’ experiences completing this gendered travel by bicycle using social practice theory to demonstrate how even difficult household serving trips are possible by bicycle when people are equipped with certain meanings, competencies, and materials. This paper contributes to the cycling literature by demonstrating the ways in which people use bicycles to complete gendered mobilities of care in a low-cycling city. By highlighting the challenges people face, as well as they ways in which some people overcome these challenges, it also points to possible policy interventions that could encourage city cycling.
Transport cycling uptake is on the rise in many cities; in Toronto, Canada, cycling is the fastest growing mode of transportation. In many of these cities there is evidence that cycling participation rates are not distributed equally across the population. Notably, a gender-gap in cycling has been observed in many cities with low cycling rates, including Toronto, whereby approximately two thirds of commuter cyclists identify as men and one third identify as women. This thesis is concerned with gender and cycling. Drawing from perspectives from feminist geography, this research examines how the embodied experience of cycling shapes, and how is it shaped by, intersecting axes of identity. A critical literature review of articles concerned with gender and cycling finds that two hypotheses are commonly explored to explain the gender-gap in cycling: (1) that women cycle less than men due to greater concerns over safety and (2) due to their tendency to complete more household-serving travel, a type of travel said to be more challenging to do by bike because it often involves carrying goods and/or children. The social factors underpinning these trends, as well as the ways in which other axes of identity intersect with gender to shape cycling behaviours is lacking from the current literature. This research aims to address this research gap by providing a feminist geography of cycling. To do so, a research project was completed in collaboration with Bike Host, a cycling mentorship program targeting immigrants and refugees in Toronto, Canada. Amongst other research activities, semi-structured interviews were completed with participants to explore the embodied experience of cycling. Key results from this study are iii presented in three chapters. The first examines the gendered and classed embodied practices that shape and are shaped by cycling. Then, the social, temporal, and spatial dimensions of many different types of fear of cycling are explored. Finally, the ways in which participants used bicycles to complete household-serving travel, a gendered mobility, are reported. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates the role patriarchal and classist power relations play in shaping who cycles.
Introduction: Bicycles are a source of transportation, recreation, and exercise throughout the world. Bicycling is associated with both health and environmental benefits but also poses a risk of injury. The use of bicycle helmets has been shown to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with cycling. It is unknown if helmet use differs across Wisconsin geographic areas and sociodemographic groups. Methods: Data were obtained from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW). Bicycle use and helmet use frequency were determined from a self-administered questionnaire that contained questions specific to preventative health behaviors. Descriptive statistics summarized overall bicycle ridership. Chi-square and Student t tests were performed to assess relationships between bicycle and helmet use across geographic categories and sociodemographic groups. Results: Differences between sex, race or ethnicity, and education level were found to be associated with bicycle ridership and the frequency of helmet use. Men were significantly more likely to report riding a bicycle and never wearing a helmet. Individuals from urban communities reported always wearing a helmet more often than rural communities. Higher education levels were associated with higher levels of bicycle and helmet use. Race or ethnicity was not associated with bicycle ridership but was associated with differences in helmet use frequency. Conclusion: Nearly half of those who ride bicycles in Wisconsin report never wearing a helmet. Since bicycle ridership and helmet use were found to be associated with a number of sociodemographic characteristics, any solution should consider the role of equity when attempting to increase ridership or helmet use.
Car was the dominant mode of travel for all groups. While fewer women regularly cycled (2%) compared to men (5%), women travelled less each day (12–17% less distance) and were more likely to use public transport and walk than men. These gender patterns were broadly replicated in people who were regular cyclists. Women made 17–47% more motorised trips of less than 5 km than men each day. Overall half of regular cyclists achieved 600 METS or above per week through travel related physical activity, compared to 11–15% of non-regular cyclists. Even after full model adjustment men had more than twice the odds (OR 2.58 (95%CI:2.29–2.92)) of cycling compared to women.
Men are more likely to cycle than women in NZ and cyclists get more physical activity. Nonetheless, analysis across all travel (irrespective of regularity of cycling status) suggests that women use more diverse travel modes and generate lower greenhouse gas emissions than men. Better consideration of the social processes shaping travel is needed to create policy, institutions, programmes and infrastructure that achieve the long term goals of the transport system, such as increasing cycling and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.