Postby Tequestra » Thu Jun 14, 2018 6:00 pm
When they write, 'segregated', do they mean segregated from cars or segregated from men?
There is a woman I notice every once in a while, perhaps every couple of weeks, when I look out my front window onto my street. She rides a nice looking 24" 'family-style' frame with a silverfish battery behind the seat tube, and she moves quite fast up the slight hill. Maybe around 30km/h, which is exceptionally quick to see for a lone sheila in casual gear sans lycra.
Electric dreams ...
It is a bit like the traditional argument about the gender bias in the IT business, I generally guessed at about 1:3 in favour of men. I don't know the ratio of men and women cyclists in Perth, but I would guess around the same as the computing industry, traditionally, that is. 1:2 in England, according to the link, once a week.
With cycling, it is obviously not the mathematics that turns the ladies away. Not being one, although I use the name 'Tequestra' which is my favourite bike's name, and she is female, (because I know my bikes well in spirit), I would not make that usual mistake of trying to 'sexomorphorise' over a species that which I am not, so what it might be that causes women to shun the tredley I would not try to guess, but I would like it if there were more equal numbers of women and men doing the Copenhagen thing. I like the women, truly, but this is about demographics of the political variety. The more women who ride bikes regularly, the more the politicians will grab the opportunity to legislate in our favour. Welcome fellow ladies. Welcome fellow voters.
Safety in the city is one thing. There are equal risks of being run over by a car for either gender. Safety in the country on dark roads on dark nights is another. A man alone is easy prey, but a woman alone is easier and for the well-known reasons, likely to be a more valuable prize for maniacs with unfortunate intentions. There are places I have walked at night when I was young where I would consider myself asking for trouble to walk at night now, and I am not even a woman. That is one safety concern.
During the day, in populated public areas, it would seem to me that there are equal risks for every meatbomb getting around on a bike, and if anything, it is safer for women to cycle in the city than for men.
Why is this?, you ask. It is because mothers are women and mothers are known to instictively put the safety of their children in the back seats ahead of all other concerns, which means that given the choice of colliding head-on with a rampant truck or knocking off a cyclist to avoid the truck, the mother will take out the cyclist to save her children, and debatably rightfully so. It depends on whose mother.
Now with recent media campaigns promoting 'the sisterhood' I would suspect that given the option of hitting a female cyclist rather than hitting a truck, that a mother might have a much more confusing decision in the heat of the moment.
In summary, in the city, in public, in daylight, at peak hour, a female cyclist will likely have a better chance against the cars than a male. It is safer for female cyclists in the city than male cyclists.
In the dark, in the country, riding alone, one must ask oneself, why not plan more sensibly?
Viva le Tour Electrique' !!!