CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
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Cycling is not equitably distributed across the UK population. While men and women walk around the same amount, and walking participation only declines slightly with age, the picture for cycling is very different. Statistics from the DfT suggest only one in thirty English women over 65 does any cycling – mode share for all trips being well under 1% for this group. Effectively nothing.
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http://rachelaldred.org/writing/culture-equity-and-cycle-infrastructure
"During the post-war car boom, transport cycling (like bus use in fact) became increasingly associated with poverty. Yet we have more recently seen cycling grow among more privileged demographic groups. The intriguing thing from a sociological perspective is the continuation of the poverty stigma alongside other stigmas (stigmata?). For example, not only might you, as a cyclist, be seen as unable to afford a car, you might also now alternatively be seen as a humourless eco-warrior, a health freak, a middle-class cultist trying to impose your values on others – the list goes on.
There’s a stigma for everyone, it seems – but some are more affected by stigma than others. My research found that in Cambridge, poverty stigma wasn’t generally so strong; it was much stronger in Hull where I was told ‘lawyers don’t cycle’. But in Cambridge, what poverty stigma remained disproportionately affected working-class and self-employed people; more concerned about appearing poor than university dons, who might not even realise the stigma still existed in their city."
Although the author argues building high quality segregated infrastructure will mitigate some of this (using the analogy of bus service provision), I'd guess it will only do so to a certain extent.
As she continues:
"Of course, it’s not only among Black people, low income people, women, or older people, that cycling has a low status. Cycling has a low status in dominant policy and media communities, among the most advantaged as well as the most marginalised groups. In relation to the car, Mimi Sheller has cogently pointed out that ‘Especially so long as high income-earners and professional elites continue to equate car worth with personal worth, the young and the disempowered will continue to use cars for status compensation.’ Similarly, while sustainable modes are associated to some extent with the failure to afford a car, the identity threat this represents can hit the marginalised hardest. (The elite don’t need to worry about being seen as poor.)
To give another example, we could think of the differential effect of sportiness. In the UK, cycling is associated with the kind of traits that threaten dominant constructions of femininity; implying bright Lycra and sweat, grimaces and helmet hair. "
Our problem in the Anglophone cultures is that cycling ceased being a mass modal choice a relatively long time ago. Only in exceptional cases (Edinburgh being one) will that long term trend be reversed partially. Unless there's a will to change things radically, which given the issues identified above, seems unlikely.
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