http://www.elycycle.org.uk/2013/08/01/working-women-are-too-busy-to-cycle
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
"Working women are “too busy” to cycle"
(31 posts)-
Posted 11 years ago #
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Or maybe the headline should read: "50% of women can't imagine any alternative to car culture".
On the other hand, from the article:
The cold reality is that we in the UK have a society where women get paid less in general and therefore end up working harder in many cases. Then by offering no alternative to driving, you force them to pay for a car they then have to pay to run so they can work longer hours to pay for the car and in turn the childcare costs on top. I’ve met single mums who literally spend their entire working week driving just a few miles but in slow traffic to drop of their kids to work a long shift at minimum wage to sit in their car for another couple of miles but again waiting in traffic, and repeat. That’s their life.
Posted 11 years ago # -
My wife didn't give up because it took too long. She gave up because of violently aggressive traffic.
Posted 11 years ago # -
If they were to talk to their Continental counterparts, they would learn that in place with good cycling infrastructure, the kids just find their own way to school, etc without the taxi service and mothers have more time for themselves.
Posted 11 years ago # -
It's true that "too busy" is often a cover story for a number of other reasons someone might not want to do something. In the case of cycling, those reasons are likely to be "it's too dangerous/not normal/hard work/makes you sweaty/only for poor people/I prefer my car", etc. It's just easier to say you're "too busy", a bit like when someone you don't really like invites you for tea. Don't want to offend them by revealing your true feelings, so "too busy" will do.
Posted 11 years ago # -
If they were to talk to their Continental counterparts
We do things differently here, we're not fully part of Europe. Europeans are aware of this as much as we are. Scotland in particular seems exotic and romantic to central Europeans: while in Leipzig my colleagues introduced me as "our guest from the island across the sea".
Some friends of mine moved to the Netherlands from Edinburgh two years ago for career reasons. When they lived here, they went everywhere by car, they did not even own bikes. Now they live in the Netherlands, they cycle everywhere, and even own a Bakfiets for transporting kids, shopping, etc.
People do whatever they see 'everyone else' doing, whatever is 'normal' where they happen to live. Unless they are incedibly strong willed/'brave'/eccentric/mad. Like 'us'.
Posted 11 years ago # -
"People do whatever they see 'everyone else' doing, whatever is 'normal' where they happen to live. Unless they are incedibly strong willed/'brave'/eccentric/mad. Like 'us'."
This, 100%
Posted 11 years ago # -
"People do whatever they see 'everyone else' doing, whatever is 'normal' where they happen to live."
Baaaaa
Posted 11 years ago # -
It's partly doing what others do but partly it's doing what's easiest. Just back from the Netherlands and the three mile run to the shops for a case of beer by bike was the only mode available but I have no doubt that had the car been sitting next to the bike, I'd have been on the bike.
It's the flatness, the separate bike lane (not a separated path), the little 'slip road' that takes you round the traffic lights so you don't need to stop, the crossing lights at the big road that stop the traffic so you barely wait, the hundreds (literally) of bike parking spaces outside the little supermarket. If he could have bought and carried the beer, I could have comfortably sent my nine-year-old on his own.
Here? The same three miles to the shop in Rosyth. OK, there's a hill up to the main road but then I need to decide between riding the A985 (a trunk road, limit is 50 but no one does 50) or riding illegally on the narrow, bumpy, glassy footpath alongside. If I ride illegally, I still need to cross the A985 twice (find your own gap in the traffic) and once using (illegally riding on residential pavements) a pedestrian crossing.
But you know all this.
Posted 11 years ago # -
kids just find their own way to school, etc without the taxi service
yet UK culture has such a sensationalised fear regarding "stranger danger", toward women and/or children, hence the desire of just about everyone to sit in "safe" isolated cages as much as possible
Posted 11 years ago # -
Which is kinda the same point. The infrastructure provision (and yes, lack of hills) makes it easier to be normal cycling. That's us looking at it as a cyclist where we can truly understand the difference in the infrastructure. To many others it'll be a case of going to the Netherlands or Denmark and saying "There are loads of cyclists here!
That said, I have a couple of friends (who don't drive, neither has a licence, but they don't cycle either) who went for a long weekend in Copenhagen and went nowhere near a bike as they still thought it was 'too dangerous'.
So actually I have no idea what my point was. As you were!
Posted 11 years ago # -
It *is* more complicated to cycle with kids in tow, with shopping to carry, and when you've got to combine the school drop off with going on to work, turning up looking professional, and then doing the supermarket run on the way home. Add in the fact that most 'off road' routes are also dark in the winter months and back alleys and underpasses aren't very inviting to lone females, and the complications multiply. As long as women are more likely to combine childcare with work and running the home, then they are less likely to cycle *in the conditions we have in the UK*. In the NL there are more bike journeys by women than by men, because women make more trips than men (again, shopping, childcare + work) - but then as Insto says, they've got the conditions where kids can cycle alongside them and you can easily get to the shops.
Posted 11 years ago # -
PS I should add that I'm sure all you chaps on here pull your weight at home, don't leave all the childcare and shopping to your female partners and do your fair share of the school run - but that's certainly not the case across the UK
Posted 11 years ago # -
It's easy to dismiss it as lack of willpower/individualism, but the social pressures to conform are incredibly powerful. Anyone have teenage kids? What they go through regarding, say, fashion sense, behavioural norms, owning the latest this or that, being 'cool' does not end when they turn 21.
Folk may care less about the particular social anxieties of young people when they start having kids or hit middle age, but they come under other enormous pressures to conform to what 'society' expects them to be. Your house, internal décor, garden, car, furniture, gadgets, clothes, lifetstyle activities, even the food you eat all say something about who you are and your status in society. Of course as well as your peers there are external forces influencing your choices in some or all of these areas (eg. advertisers, government).
When a motorist screams abuse at a cyclist, he (sometimes she) is not just saying "get out of the way", but also "you freak, you're not normal". It's not rational, it's not "nice" but it is sadly all too human.
Posted 11 years ago # -
If they could get up in time to leave at 6.30am and hang around until I get back at 6.30pm I'd happily do the school run.
Posted 11 years ago # -
@WC
I'm not sure I would have enjoyed cycling in Amsterdam. It's the combination of busyness and unfamiliarity.Posted 11 years ago # -
That said, I have a couple of friends (who don't drive, neither has a licence, but they don't cycle either) who went for a long weekend in Copenhagen and went nowhere near a bike as they still thought it was 'too dangerous'.
There's an element of non-cyclists in the UK being pre-conditioned to regard cycling as dangerous full-stop. Even places that have good segregation (NL/Ger/Den/Bel) might look dangerous to them because until you have cycled there you do not fully understand the rules of the road/priority/the extent that drivers respect cyclists and their infrastructure.
Posted 11 years ago # -
yet UK culture has such a sensationalised fear regarding "stranger danger", toward women and/or children, hence the desire of just about everyone to sit in "safe" isolated cages as much as possible
A culture we share with North America. It's a socio-liguistic historical thang.
Most of western Europe headed down the car culture rod from the 1950s onwards, looking to the USA as the model. The difference is that in places like Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany they started saying "that's far enough" at various points in the 1970s/1980s. UK (and other places like Spain, Portugal, even France) just kept going towards 'carmageddon'.
The paranoiac safety culture is a by-product of car culture, not the cause. If nobody walks (or cycles), the streets are not safe. See Los Angeles as the exemplar in this regard.
Posted 11 years ago # -
When a motorist screams abuse at a cyclist, he (sometimes she) is not just saying "get out of the way", but also "you freak, you're not normal".
On wednesday morning rush hour, a Stagecoach Fife driver cut me up really badly on Dean Bridge - when I caught up with him at Charlotte Square he adopted middle finger and declared that i should get a life.
Young guy with a beard and turban, I'd be interested to know if anyone else has had run-ins with him.
I can't take it up with stagecoach, because i subsequently impolitely offered to rearrange his attitude.
Posted 11 years ago # -
Actually Copenhagen is quite daunting to cycle in, especially at rush hour. It's not the motorised traffic - it's being in a press of bikes, some going quite fast, and with unfamiliar rules to follow. It took me a while to work out how to turn left or even stop without causing a massive bike pileup (I didn't cause a pileup BTW, I just kept on cycling until I'd worked it out). Sometimes when you're visiting an unfamiliar city for a weekend, it's more relaxing just to find your way on foot
Posted 11 years ago # -
As I described it elsewhere: It challenges every instinct you've developed. Hands hovering over brakes, eyeballing the driver until you realise that even though he's on the roundabout and signalling to turn across your path, he's stopping in the middle of it to give you priority. Can't say I was used to it after doing it every day for a fortnight. Too conditioned by dealing with home made numpties. Dutch whizz round with headphones in, reading on their mobiles and paying no attention to the cars stopping around them.
Posted 11 years ago # -
"@WC
I'm not sure I would have enjoyed cycling in Amsterdam. It's the combination of busyness and unfamiliarity."I tried cycling in Amsterdam - takes a little while to get used to it. Wrote a comparison of cycling in Amsterdam and Copenhagen at the time, and I think my differentiation of Amsterdam as a rave and Copenhagen as a ballet still holds. My other half loved cycling in Copenhagen (and Paris), but we only lasted half a day on the bikes in Amsterdam.
Posted 11 years ago # -
Anyway, back on topic. From my limited experience of a couple of working women in the office, my partner and a friend, women seem to cope just as easily as blokes with the whole cycling and working thing, if they want to cycle in the first place. I suspect that's the critical thing - if you want to, you'll find the way. If you don't, you'll find a reason not to.
What seems to be needed is a little bit more preparation - clothes, panniers, sequencing activities. Just like I find I need to do to cycle to work. For instance, Mandy will walk the 100 yards up to the school with our wee lassie (Ewan walks on his own) pushing her bike and then cycle on to the shop or the gym. If she's going to the gym, she just swims because the cycling is, err, exercise. In Dutchland she bought herself a couple of those big square panniers that Dutch bikes have because, unlike the touring panniers shops here sell, they can actually hold some shopping.
Posted 11 years ago # -
http://wisob.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/on-a-conversation-with-my-sister/
... My sister surprised me by saying that she would quite like to cycle to work, which is about 8 miles away, at least sometimes, but trying to get her children to school and nursery and then herself on to work by bike just isn’t going to happen...
She complicates matters by having twins, which means that a set-up like Hankcheif's or SRD's doesn't work as there are two children who are the same size to transport.
Posted 11 years ago # -
a set-up like Hankcheif's or SRD's doesn't work as there are two children who are the same size to transport.
She needs a Thorn Me'n'U2: http://www.sjscycles.co.uk/thorn-me-n-u2-2012-yellow-new-prod28191/
Posted 11 years ago # -
In the NL there are more bike journeys by women than by men, because women make more trips than men (again, shopping, childcare + work)
Not just in NL, from what I've seen that's true in much of DE too, possibly DK and CH as well.
Posted 11 years ago # -
A complete non story. 'Wishing they could ride to work' but ' being too busy' isn't specific to working women, you could take a survey amongst many groups of male workers and get the same result. It's not about being too busy, it's about finding any old excuse. And of course where women are concerned the most attractive excuse is to blame it on men, as alluded to by sallyh.
Posted 11 years ago # -
It's not about being too busy, it's about finding any old excuse
nah, its about fear and lack of imagination
neither of which are gender-specific attributes
but both attributes are heavily promoted in this culture
hate the game, not the playa
Posted 11 years ago # -
Many here are too young to remember, but the "school run" didn't exist 30 years ago, it is the product of motor centric Government policy. There is not reason why it should continue to exist in the 21 century, when you look at the damage it has done...
Posted 11 years ago # -
"... the 'school run' didn't exist 30 years ago..."
It did at my primary school, eventually resulting in a ban on drop-off/pick-up traffic at the end of the cul-de-sac at the end of which the school lurked.
Posted 11 years ago #
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