![\"Large](\"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Female-friendly-cycling-Womens-Tour.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nNext weekend, on 11 June, one of the world’s most prestigious cycling events, The Women\u2019s Tour<\/a>, comes to Oxfordshire. According to its organisers, it brings with it a safety \u201cbubble with\u2026world class riders at the centre\u201d. Sadly, on a day-to-day basis, many women are put off walking, cycling, wheeling through our county\u2019s public spaces because they do not feel that kind of safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the past 2 years three women have been killed<\/a> by HGV drivers while cycling in Oxford. This replicates a pattern across the UK of vulnerability on our roads linked to gender. There is anecdotal evidence of women in Oxford reconsidering whether they feel safe to cycle around the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not just barriers formed by infrastructure and social issues that prevent women walking and cycling, it\u2019s also the perception<\/em> of safety.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n When children from an East Oxford secondary school were asked recently about what helped them spend time in parks, nearly half replied that \u201cit was easy to get there by myself\u201d. This is an important factor for an age group with no access to a car. But nearly one in three girls said the \u201cplace feels safe\u201d, with one in five adding it must be \u201csafe to get there by myself\u201d. Girls gave responses that included perceived safety at a much higher rate than boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This cause was taken up by Sheffield organisation Our Bodies, Our Streets which successfully campaigned for Sheffield City Council to pass a motion challenging the \u201csystemic and everyday culture of harassment\u201d that women face on our streets and to address this through evidence-led, co-designed infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Creating inviting spaces for everyone is not only a question of how we design<\/em> our streets, but also how we activate<\/em> those spaces. Barking railway station was transformed by local organisation Street Space through the \u201ccollaborative design of planters, seating, artwork and the curation of a programme of lively performances\u201d. These low-cost interventions led to three in four of those people who had previously felt unsafe outside the station to change their perceptions of the area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put simply, people make places safe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n But \u201cfemale-friendly streets\u201d aren’t just about safety, as Melissa and Chris Bruntlett wrote in Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlthough responsibility for care work has shifted\u2026the division of labor continues to rest largely on the shoulders of women\u2026the danger in not considering care work and the trips required to perform it\u2026is that the needs of a significant portion of the population are left unmet…One of the most common characteristics of care trips is they regularly involve a combination of numerous shorter trips and multiple stops [and] our transportation systems are not planned with multiple stops in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What this means is that when we think of \u201cactive travel\u201d, we prioritise cycle-lane commuter routes over everyday family and community-focused travel to parks, schools and community centres, like those enabled by low traffic neighbourhoods<\/a> (LTNs).<\/p>\n\n\n\n It doesn’t have to be like this. In the Netherlands, women aged 65\u201374 are more likely to cycle than any adult male age category and adult women cycle more than men overall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oxfordshire just received a \u00a310.4 million government grant<\/a> to improve walking and cycling infrastructure in the county. If you\u2019ve got any ideas about how you, or a group you are part of, might help more women and girls to feel confident spending time in and moving through our communities in a more active way, then we may be able to help. Please get in touch at info@activeoxfordshire.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Matt Roebuck<\/p>\n Next weekend, on 11 June, one of the world’s most prestigious cycling events, The Women\u2019s Tour, comes to Oxfordshire. According to its organisers, it brings with it a safety \u201cbubble with\u2026world class riders at the centre\u201d. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[5,7,56,57,30],"class_list":["post-9745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-on-yer-bike","tag-blog","tag-on-yer-bike","tag-safety","tag-the-womens-tour","tag-womens-cycling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why do women feel unsafe?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How do we create safe spaces?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What ideas do you have?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n