BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

interesting angle, i wonder what pgh's gender numbers are for cycling

imakwik1: This came up a few weeks ago in the Bike-PGH web-log.

http://bike-pgh.org/2009/09/2008-city-commuting-trends-are-in-how-does-pittsburgh-stack-up-nationally/

Yes, I called it a web-log.

Based on the bicycle counts that we have completed in the City, the gender split is somewhere between 60/40 and 70/30 men/women.

The strong connection between gender ratios and overall bicycle usage was not something I knew at all. I'm always very interested in indirect surrogate measures liek that.

When I went to Leipzig, Germany, though, I knew it was a very different bike climate when I saw more than one 60+ year old ladies on bikes.

Mick

I think the ratios of men to women are more even in certain parts of the City, most notably the South Side, and parts of the East End. It might also be indicative of different riding habits between men and women. Most of our counts are conducted during morning and evening rush hours, trying to measure the commuting cyclists. I know that when I bicycle commute from the Ohio River community that I call home to downtown, I see 4-5 male riders on a given day, and only rarely see another woman. Yet when I tool around the South Side, or the Baum Boulevard corridor on a weekend, I see more women on bikes. Not as many women as men, of course..... And, while I see men of all ages and skill levels, I rarely see more mature women, of the type Mick says he sees in Leipzig.

Yeah, maybe people should do counts of older folks on bikes as another metric of how bike-friendly a city is.

Definitely true that super old ladies ride their dutch utility bikes around German cities.