Velo City Conference - Day 1

This week, Copenhagen is hosting Velo City 2010, an international conference examining the past, present, and future of biking in cities. I'll be attending and blogging daily about my experiences. The conference began today, June 22, and will run until Friday, June 25.

The best place to begin any discussion about bicycling in cities around the world is with demographics. Who bikes already and who might be persuaded to bike? Where should bicycle advocacy groups and urban planners direct their attention? My conclusion today surprised me: I have come to believe that the most important target group for the urban bicycling movement is women. If biking in cities is to become a truly mainstream phenomenon, women above all must be convinced that biking is a viable transportation option--safe, convenient, and comfortable.

In his lecture opening the conference, Bo Asmus Kjeldgaard, Copenhagen’s Mayor of Technical and Environmental Administration, argued that the best way to measure the health of a city's biking infrastructure is to look at women and children. If women and children bicycle through a city’s streets as often as their adult male counterparts, his argument went, then city planners and bicycle advocates have succeeded in making urban biking accessible and desirable to ordinary citizens.

The mobilization of women has certainly played a significant role in Copenhagen's success as the biking capital of the world. During the question-and-answer session at the end of one of today's presentations, a conference participant from Switzerland noted that she was astonished to see the number of women biking on Copenhagen's streets. It was an image of a woman, wearing a skirt and stopped with her bicycle at a traffic light, that propelled Mikael Colville-Andersen’s "Copenhagenize" blog to international fame, teaching the world about Copenhagen's particular flair for cycling as a means of everyday transport. And as Mayor Kjeldgaard himself noted, the cargo bike, a device especially popular among Danish mothers for its ability to transport small children or large loads of groceries, has become the icon of the expansion of Copenhagen’s bicycle culture to include all citizens.  In the story of cycling in Copenhagen, women have played a leading role.

Statistics presented by Ben Plowden, a transportation official in London, confirmed that the demographics of city bicyclists are gendered. In London, as in many other cities where biking has yet to rise to Copenhagen’s levels, bicyclists are predominantly male—two-thirds male in London’s case.  And in London, unlike Copenhagen, biking is still viewed largely as a sport, rather than as a form of daily transport.  Sport cycling comes with a cult of speed and is often associated with a particular machoism.  Convince women that biking is for ordinary people, wearing ordinary clothes, riding ordinary bicycles, and traveling at ordinary speeds, and a city like London will have accomplished perhaps the most important cultural shift needed to realize a Copenhagen-like biking system.

From my own observations, this persistent association between bicycle travel and sport is one of the fundamental differences between biking in Copenhagen and biking in the United States. In the US, a society that certainly has not embraced bicycle culture en masse, it is not uncommon for cyclist-commuters to change out of their “bike clothes” and into their “work clothes” after reaching their offices—and perhaps even to shower upon their arrival. By contrast, at today’s conference, Mayor Kjeldgaard laughed at the idea of requiring employers to provide their employees for bicycle showers. “What would you do if you had to bike to a meeting on the other side of the city,” he asked, “shower when you arrived at your meeting?”  Ordinary citizens need to see cycling as more than just a sweaty sport before they will be willing to change their behavior.  The sight of women and children riding down bicycle lanes can help to realize this shift in perception.

The importance of women in the urban bicycling movement seems to transcend the developed/ developing world divide. Indeed, bikes can serve as a tool for the emancipation of women in cities around the world, providing them with a mobility and freedom that would have otherwise been much more difficult to achieve. In his presentation, Mexican urban planner Antonio Suarez noted that women in Mexico City have been using the city’s shared bikes at a higher rate, connecting this shared bicycle program to a culture shift occurring in the city. As in Copenhagen, the development of a bicycle culture in places such as Mexico City can help to promote a culture of equality among citizens—gender equality as well as socioeconomic equality.

So today’s conference sessions taught me that women are an important demographic group for the bicycle community to target not only because women can help to make biking a more mainstream practice, but also because reaching out women can create solutions for seemingly unrelated problems facing cities around the world. While not as easy to convert to bicycle transport as 25- to 40-year-old men, female bikers, sporting high heels and pushing cargo bikes, might just be the truest face of today’s urban biking movement.