Fashion on wheels

While traffic engineers experiment with cycle lanes and traffic calming, social researchers are suggesting that perhaps a better approach might be to ask that old question: What do women want? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-more-bicyclists-on-the-road .

In an article in The Guardian, Helen Pidd quotes some significant statistics from Sustrans that 79% of British women do not cycle at all even though 43% have access to a bike. In the article she suggests that perhaps one reason for this situation is the fact that cycling clothes make women look as if they have "been attacked by a highlighter pen". She goes on to talk about clothing designers such as Cyclodelic who have recently secured an agreement for the British retail chain, Topshop to stock their products. The implication is that looking good while cycling may encourage more women to cycle.
Certainly cycle clothing for women riders has been a significant issue in the past. Patricia Grimshaw, in her landmark book, Women's Suffrage in New Zealand, on the struggle for universal suffrage in New Zealand traces the beginning of the movement to a group of cyclists in Christchurch. lead by Kate Shepherd. The problem was that women's clothing in the late Nineteenth Century did not lend itself to cycling. Mrs Amelia Bloomer's radical proposal made in the 1850s, now the object of popular derision, did not gain the approval of the leaders of the community and so encouraged resistance by women to attitudes which restricted them and limited what they could do.
Cycling then lead to a major social reform but can it now lead to a major environmental and health reform by making cycling attractive to women? I had not heard before now that looking unfashionable was the reason most women do not cycle. Yet we have groups like Frocks on bikes who promote women riding bicycles without having to "lycra up" and a growing number of bicycle chic websites and blogs. Have we had it wrong all this time?

Meanwhile, the Beauty and the Bike project is getting girls back on bikes in the UK:http://www.bikebeauty.org/english/ . And Taiwan's "godmother of the bicycle", Bonnie Tu (executive vice-presidentand chief financial officer of Giant Bicycles), is on a mission to end maledominance in bike design: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article6946506.ece