Bicycle NSW attended a workshop last Tuesday to discuss what’s needed to get to more women and children riding bikes, led by Women4Climate and supported by C40 Cities.
The City of Sydney is one of the C40 cities committed to climate action to improve our health and environmental sustainability. C40 produces a range of accessible resources for anyone to use, that can be applied wherever you live.
People who have ridden in Sydney CBD can see evidence of the commitment to bike infrastructure, and that has paid off in increased rates of travel by bike and reduced congestion and pollution. A key to achieving a mode-shift to active travel is meeting the needs of women and children.
The workshop looked at the different ways women travel and challenges they face. Men tend to take more journeys that involve a single origin and destination, whereas women do more ‘trip-chaining’: taking journeys with multiple stops or purposes, and carrying more equipment.
More women are responsible for dropping off children to school or childcare, managing elder-care and running errands. This makes their journeys more complicated, time-consuming and difficult to complete using active transport.
The Solution
We worked through a range of issues and scenarios and came up with possible solutions including: e-bikes, end of trip facilities, safer infrastructure that enables children to travel to school independently, shaded bike paths in hot areas and better lighting. Importantly we also discussed the range of barriers to successful implementation.
The outputs of the workshop will eventually lead into a conference for a much wider audience in 2020, with the intention of identifying and developing solutions to get more women and children pedalling.
“We have seen great success stories overseas when governments restructure how the services they provide impact women and children,” said General Manager of Public Affairs, Bastien Wallace.
“Enabling more women and children to travel actively helps improve health, reduce congestion and be part of tackling climate change,” said Bastien.
We will keep you up to date on conference dates and the opportunity to make your contribution to positive change.
