- Generation Active, Hyndburn
Nichola Honey, 2 August 2010, Cycling England
Last year the Big Lottery funded Cycling Projects post in Hyndburn, Accrington launched their first cycling session for Asian ladies. Many ladies had never been on a bike before and had to overcome many personal and cultural barriers in order to access the sessions. However 12 months on the results have been remarkable.
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For further information see the sustrans web site or contact Nichola.Honey@eastlancspct.nhs.uk - The Crusade Against Female Cyclists (Mildly NSFW)
April Streeter, 20 July 2010, USA: TreeHugger - Cars & Transportation (cars)
Female cyclists have a hard enough time - we are generally a bit more safety-conscious and reticent when it comes to getting out on city streets, and the athletic among us who do fearlessly dive into bike racing and other cycling sports do so with less support or acknowledgment from the rest of the sporting world than men cyclists get. So the last thing a female cyclist needs is a fatwa - a ruling on a point of Islamic law.
Visit Site - Talking Planning, Diversity, and Cycling With the Women Behind Velo City
Ben Fried, 29 June 2010, StreetsBlog
Naomi Doerner, Samelys Lopez, and Karyn Williams are planners, New Yorkers, and cyclists who set out about a year ago to change their profession. Responding to the lack of diversity in the planning and design fields -- and within the bicycling community -- the three of them formed the non-profit Velo City last September. Their goal is to introduce young people from diverse communities to the fields of urban planning and design, using cycling as a gateway.
Visit Site - Pick Up the Pace in Walking, Biking, to Avoid Putting on Pounds
Nicole Ostrow, 28 June 2010, Bloomberg
Women who want to prevent weight gain as they get older need to ride a bicycle or walk briskly every day rather than just strolling, a study from Harvard University found.
Women who were ages 25 to 42 at the start of the research gained less weight if they spent an additional 30 minutes a day riding bikes or walking 3 miles an hour or faster by the end of the study. Those who increased only slow walking didn’t reduce their weight gain over the 16-year study, according to the report published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Visit Site - Want to keep the weight off? Get on your bike
Todd Eastham, 1 July 2010, REUTERS - Lifestyle
Just five minutes of riding a bicycle each day can help a younger woman keep the pounds off, U.S. researchers have reported in a study offering one potentially easy way to help Americans slim down.
The heaviest women benefited the most, the team at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston reported. "Small daily increments in bicycling helped women control their weight. But the more time women spent bicycling, the better," said Harvard's Rania Mekary, who worked on the study.
Visit Site - Bicycle Riding, Walking, and Weight Gain in Premenopausal Women
Anne C. Lusk, PhD; Rania A. Mekary, PhD; Diane Feskanich, ScD; Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH
Arch Intern Med. 2010;170(12):1050-1056.
To our knowledge, research has not been conducted on bicycle riding and weight control in comparison with walking. Our objective was to assess the association between bicycle riding and weight control in premenopausal women.
At baseline, only 39% of participants walked briskly, while only 1.2% bicycled for more than 30 min/d. For a 30-min/d increase in activity between 1989 and 2005, weight gain was significantly less for brisk walking (–1.81 kg; 95% confidence interval [CI], –2.05 to –1.56 kg), bicycling (–1.59 kg; 95% CI, –2.09 to –1.08 kg), and other activities (–1.45 kg; 95% CI, –1.66 to –1.24 kg) but not for slow walking (+0.06 kg; 95% CI, –0.22 to 0.35 kg). Women who reported no bicycling in 1989 and increased to as little as 5 min/d in 2005 gained less weight (–0.74 kg; 95% CI, –1.41 to –0.07 kg; P value for trend, <.01) than those who remained nonbikers. Normal-weight women who bicycled more than 4 h/wk in 2005 had a lower odds of gaining more than 5% of their baseline body weight (odds ratio, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.56 to 0.98) compared with those who reported no bicycling; overweight and obese women had a lower odds at 2 to 3 h/wk (odds ratio, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.34 to 0.86).
To access full article - Visit Site - Hour of exercise may be too much for busy U.S. women
Julie Steenhuysen, 24 March 2010, Reuters - Health Lifestyle
Healthy middle-aged women in America will be hard pressed to get in the full hour of moderate exercise it will take to avoid gaining weight as they age, and it may be too challenging for some.
Visit Site - Wheels are in motion
Monica Glare, 13 March 2010, SMH.com.au - Traveller
The decision to bring my bike with me when I relocated to New York City a year ago was more out of sentimentality than a belief that I'd be pedalling much. In fact, on previous visits I thought it was madness to cycle these streets, congested with cabs and cars, trucks and buses and pedestrians. A year on, I never imagined I'd have the chutzpah to cycle so much. But it's not me that's changed - New York is becoming a city that loves to cycle.
Visit Site - 5 States Where Women Barely Dare to Bike Commute
April Streeter, 4 October 2009, Sweden: TreeHugger - Cars & Transportation
The American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau has been out for about two weeks, and if you can figure out how to look at the tables, it tells an interesting story about bike commuting. The Census doesn't collect bike use data per se, but it does periodically survey which type of vehicle or method people use to get to their jobs, and as biking is one of those methods, we can get a snapshot of how many dedicated bike commuters there are in the U.S. The good news? Dedicated bike commuting is grew about 38% in the last eight years. But if women are truly the indicator species for a successful bike infrastructure, lots of states aren't getting it right.
Visit Site - How Can You Tell If Your City is Bikeable? Hint: Count the Women
Kristin Underwood, 2 October 2009, USA: TreeHugger - Cars & Transportation (bikes)What does it take to make a city bike friendly? Bike lanes? Isolated bike lanes? More bikes than cars? All of the above? In a recent article by Scientific American, the indicator species for determining how bikeable a city is is...women, and particularly the number of women on bikes. In European cities, male to female biking ratios are nearly equal, so why are men two times more likely to hop on a bike?
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Visit Site - Increasing Bike Ridership Means Pulling in Women
Nate Berg, 22 September 2009, Planetizen
In the U.S., men bike far more than women. Some researchers suggest that understanding and meeting the demands of women is the best way to increase overall ridership.
Visit Site - Luna Chix: Badass Babes on Bikes
Kristin Underwood, 14 September 2009, USA: TreeHugger - Travel & Nature (sports gear)
At this year's Wanderlust Festival, I got a chance to sit down with Karen Rehder, rider for Luna Chix and talk about bikes, babes and being a bad-ass. Here is how Luna is helping Chicks across the United States get off their butts and onto bikes.
Visit Site - Bike Belles: Sustrans Raises its Voice for Female Cycle Safety
Sami Grover, 10 September 2009, USA: TreeHugger - bikes
In a world where cyclists get shot for riding with their children, there is no doubt that personal safety is a major concern for all cyclists. But it's probably fair to say that women bare the brunt of this particular issue. April has argued before that the world needs more women on bikes (although some commenters felt her reasoning was a touch condescending), and she's also explored the question of whether women cyclists need to arm themselves. Now a UK charity is raising its voice for better protection for female cyclists. Will you join the call?
Visit Site - Mind the Gender Gap
Sarah Goodyear, 1 July 2009, StreetsBlog.Network
Yesterday's New York Times blog item about why New York women are underrepresented among the city's bike commuters didn't sit well with the authors of Streetsblog Network member Let's Go Ride a Bike. Trisha, one of the blog's authors and a bike commuter herself in Nashville, sees the piece as part of a trend (epitomized by a recent Treehugger post called "6 Reasons the World Needs More Girls on Bikes").
Visit Site - In Urban Cycling, a Gender Gap Persist
Dominick Tao, 30 June 2009, New York Times City Room
While things have changed over the past several years, with cycling rates on the rise and hundreds of miles of new bike lanes being installed around the city, the gender gap among cyclists in New York and elsewhere in America still remains.
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Women in Cycling
