Forum topic: Picking up in PG on the way to the Women's Freedom Ride

Palmers Green residents were among more than 1100 people who took to the streets of central London on their bikes on Sunday for the Women's Freedom Ride, and indeed there was a strong Palmers Green connection in the shape of Clare Rogers, who works for the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) and was in charge of organising the ride.

The event was a joyous celebration of the freedom that riding bikes offers, but at the same time carried a serious message: a demand for a better deal for women cyclists on London's streets. It was the first stage of a new campaign launched by the LCC to persuade the Mayor of London and borough leaders to do more to take away the fear that deters many women (and plenty of men too) from using this healthy and benign form of transport.

"The most fantastic and euphoric day of my life", was how Clare described it. "When we first planned the event we were expecting a couple of hundred people to take part, but more than 1200 signed up for the ride on Eventbrite and most of them actually turned up! It was a protest, but a happy one, with a carnival atmosphere."

Clare explains that the next stage of the campaign will be a petition to the Mayor of London. The aim is to persuade him to set a target date of 2030 for there to be as many women cycling on the capital's roads as there are men - a normal situation in some cities on the continent, but here in London twice as many men as women ride bikes as a means of getting around.

So why do women currently cycle so much less than men?

Clare points me to the research carried out by Lucy Marstrand-Taussig of Metis Consultants, which suggests that women, along with older people and children, are more deterred than younger men by the danger resulting from unsafe road design and the attitudes of some other road users.

Secondly, the cycle infrastructure that councils have been installing is geared towards commuting along radial routes into central London, where male riders predominate. Yet overall commuting accounts for only 15 per cent of trips made in England and women in particular make non-radial journeys

So what's needed so that people can make these local trips safely, for instance doing the school run by bike?

"People shouldn't have to brave heavy traffic to get around by bike - that's not normal, but it's the situation that we're in," says Clare. "For local journeys we need a fine-grained safe network, a combination of low-traffic networks that we can ride through safely, good crossings and protected bike lanes along main roads."