Some of the Wollondilly Community Health Staff and BARBUG members who Participated in 2011 Ride To Work

For their efforts the community health centre won the Community Health category for the highest proportion of staff participating in the Local Health Districts Ride to Work Day Awards!

Bargo Bicycle User Group members with staff from the Wollondilly Community Health Centre receiving their award from the Health Promotion Service of South Western and Sydney Local Health District.

Cycling has many health benefits like fitness, weight and stress management; environment benefits; fun and a great opportunity to meet new people.

The Bargo BUG organise rides and cycling activities in and around Wollondilly. The rides are open to anyone with a roadworthy bike and a helmet.  We encourage new riders to join and learn to ride with confidence. Children under 14 must be accompanied by an adult.

For more details contact Bargo BUG on Ph 4684 1444

In August 2011 the City of Sydney released four films celebrating the personal stories of people who ride bicycles in Sydney. The films will be shown in local cinemas starting in late August. The City used real people for the campaign, each person featured had contacted the City to express their thanks for the new cycleways. The resulting films have high production values and are a real reflection of Sydney’s diverse bike-riding population.

Everything’s Connected — Kitiya

Everything’s Connected – Caroline

Everything’s Connected – Anthony

Everything’s Connected – Les and Judy

Original Material: Cycle Resource Centre

I say, fancy a cycle? A slow and elegant ride through the city streets in dapper and ladylike apparel followed by the Tweed Games.

European women love to get on their bikes. kamshots/Flickr

Cycling for transport in Australia is characterised by several “missing” population groups: women, children, adolescents and older adults.

Women comprise about one-fifth of commuter cyclists in Australia. In countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Japan, more women than men travel by bike.

There has been considerable speculation about why cycling for transport in Australia is less socially inclusive than in a number of other industrialised countries. For women, explanations have centred on time constraints, household responsibilities, and concerns about traffic hazards and personal safety.

While all these factors undoubtedly play a role, a recent analysis of international comparative data adds another perspective. It has found that women ride bikes for transport when the environment is friendly to cycling.

Make cycling safe, convenient and fast, and women will do it

Whether you look at national, city or local government area data, when bike riding makes up a bigger proportion of trips, the proportion of women cycling also increases.

City level data is shown in the graph below. It shows that the measures that make cycling generally appealing are those that are particularly important for women: safety, convenience and fast travel time for the short to medium-distance trips that characterise urban living.

Bicycle mode share of trips and percentage of female cyclists, large cities.

Traffic safety, in particular, is a key factor for addressing gender equity in cycling. Concerns about safety are a major barrier to cycling in Australia, and a greater barrier for women than men.

While actual injury risk is important from a road safety perspective, subjective risk perceptions appear to be more important in shaping cycling behaviour, particularly for women.

Cycling injury data in Australia and the UK indicate that women are actually at lower risk of a traffic-related cycling injury than men, particularly for the more severe injuries. However, consistent with gender differences in risk aversion in general, women are both more concerned about safety and more affected by safety concerns.

Relative to men, women prefer to use cycling routes where they can get further away from motor vehicle traffic. They are also more likely to go out of their way to use a safer route, and to cycle more cautiously in traffic.

In Australia, road safety is about cars

While Australia is among the world leaders in road traffic safety in general, the focus has been on protecting motor vehicle occupants. Cycling safety has been relatively neglected.

Serious injury rates for cyclists in Australia are increasing. They are several times higher than fatality and injury rates in the high-cycling industrialised countries of Europe and Asia.

In Australia, efforts to increase cycling and improve the safety of cyclists have focussed on separating cyclists from motorists. Investment in cycling infrastructure has been ad hoc and inadequate.

Older women have gone missing in the Australian cycling population. (marcusuke/Flickr)

Effective cycling safety measures that potentially affect motor vehicle flow are avoided. There has also been a misplaced reliance on the “safety in numbers” concept whereby cycling supposedly becomes safer as more people cycle, due to factors such as higher visibility.

Countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Japan take a different approach. If you’re making a short to medium trip in an urban area, they encourage you to ride a bike.

These countries have consistently implemented a range of transport, traffic safety and urban planning measures that systematically prioritise cycling over car travel for these trips.

Measures include establishing an extensive network of high quality bicycle routes that provide:

• good separation from motor vehicle traffic where appropriate
• good management of interactions between bicycles and cars where complete separation is not feasible.

How do “high-cycling” countries do it?

There are many policies aimed at improving the ways cyclists and drivers interact.

Intersection treatments can provide safe flow for both bicycles and cars. Extensive traffic-calmed urban areas with speed limits of 30 km/h or less make cycling more appealing.

Road safety measures consistently make the safety of cyclists more important than keeping motor vehicles moving. For example, car drivers have the legal responsibility to avoid collisions with cyclists and pedestrians. The principle is that the responsibility for injury prevention lies with the operator of the vehicle that can cause most harm.

Bikes need to take their place as another form of transport. (Mikael Colville-Andersen)

Because of these measures, cycling environments are both safe and pleasant. Cyclists rarely experience the hazardous and unpleasant interactions with motorists that characterise cycling in countries such as Australia and the USA.

It is important to recognise that these high-cycling countries are not “anti-car”; rather, they provide a more level playing field for a wider range of ways of travelling.

As in Australia, motorways and arterial roads provide for high-speed, high-volume motorised travel between major population centres. But transport and urban planning measures make cycling faster and more convenient than car travel within cities, towns and suburbs.

It’s not just regulation that makes cycling more appealing for women, children and older adults. In high-cycling countries, people are more likely to use bicycles appropriate for everyday travel – more upright bikes, in other words. Their bikes have a bigger carrying capacity (so you can take your children and do your shopping), and it’s normal to ride in everyday clothing rather than sports gear (including to work).

Because of these measures, cycling is seen as a convenient form of everyday travel for everyone, rather than a vigorous form of sport and exercise that is more appealing to young to middle-aged men.

Australia’s path forward

In countries like Australia, where few women cycle for transport, many of the factors described above are either lacking or only partly addressed.

More people, and more women, would cycle if we prioritised bicycle travel over car travel for many of the daily trips that are part of urban life. Think of the short trips you make everyday that could be on a bike if cycling was easier: taking the kids to school, picking up some things at the shop, going to work or to the gym.

Urban environments designed for safe, enjoyable bicycle travel are quite unlike those where cycling is simply tacked on to the “real transport business” of moving cars as quickly as possible at all times in all locations.

The evidence shows that as bicycle travel becomes a convenient, safe and enjoyable everyday transport option, increasing numbers of girls, adolescents and adult women will almost certainly go along for the ride.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Tweeted by @BicyclingMag

Released 9/4/2010

Children who walk or ride to school are more physically active in their day-to-day activities around their neighbourhood than those children who are driven to school, a new study finds.

The study, undertaken for VicHealth by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), also suggests that children who walk to school are significantly more connected with their local community.

ACER Chief Executive Officer, Professor Geoff Masters said: “The research involved analysing surveys and pictures drawn by 659 primary school aged children between the ages of 9 and 12.

“Our study found that only 26 per cent of the years 3 to 6 primary school aged children walked to school in the past five days.”

“Children who walked to school demonstrated a greater awareness of, and familiarity with, their local environment. They drew detailed elements of green space such as parks, trees, grass, flowers, sporting ovals and children playing football, people riding bikes, walking their dog and playgrounds.”

“In contrast, children who travelled to school by car tended to depict abstract, isolated images of their neighbourhood environment with the car and the road as the central theme. They drew images of traffic lights, road signs, school crossings, local schools, office buildings, shopping centres, and fast food outlets. They also drew their own street and a lot of empty blank spaces,” Professor Masters said.

VicHealth CEO Todd Harper said: “This study is a great insight into the hearts and minds of our children. It shows that we need to invest a lot more in their physical and emotional wellbeing.”

“This study is also an innovative look at young children, their physical activity and their connection to their local environment.”

“We know the development of healthy young minds and bodies are essential for reducing the huge burden on our health system when these children reach middle age and beyond.”

“This research has been commissioned to evaluate a VicHealth program called Streets Ahead, aimed at increasing physical activity in children aged 4 to 12 years through promoting independent mobility.”

“There is overwhelming evidence that when children walk or cycle to school, they are better off physically and importantly in terms of their social and emotional wellbeing,” Mr Harper says.

The three year evaluation study is analysing results from 1,412 primary school aged children from Prep to year 6 across 19 Primary Schools in Victoria.

The research is being presented by ACER researcher Catherine Underwood at the inaugural International Healthy Parks Healthy People Congress in Melbourne next week.

Australian Council for Educational Research

This is a really good article posted by Noel Semple about why female riders are so vulnerable

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/may/13/cycling-lorries-women-road-deaths?CMP=twt_gu

A crew of nine inspirational young adults will be cycling through Bargo on 3^rd of April 2010 with a mission to inspire youth to think about sustainable consumption in their everyday lives. On arrival in Bargo the bike riders will have covered 1200kms of their 1300km journey.

The Otesha Project (Australia): Cycling for Sustainability launches their East Coast Tour at the Sustainable Living Festival in Federation Square, Melbourne on the 19^th of February. The tour will take them to regional schools along the South East Coast of Victoria and up through the Sapphire Coast to Sydney.

Since 2000, The Otesha Project (Aus.) has pedaled across Australia educating youth and raising awareness about environmental sustainability and social justice issues. Otesha is the Swahili word for ‘reason to dream’ and is the underlining philosophy of the organisation. The Otesha crew combines theatre performance with interactive workshops to empower high school students to consider their life choices to ensure a positive and sustainable future.

Current consumption behaviours in Australia have far reaching consequences that are both unsustainable and inequitable. The negative impacts of these practices usually affect the most disempowered people in society, including young people who now face an uncertain future. For Rachael – tour coordinator – the experience of the bicycle tours is fulfilling on many different levels:

“I’m thrilled to be on tour bringing this important project to regional schools. These tours are the perfect way to inspire youth to be the change of the future. Also it’s just a great and fun experience shared by everyone involved.” she says.

The tour participants from all over Australia have spent the past six months working hard collectively to plan the tour and create the three interactive workshops focusing on some of the major sustainability issues concerning youth: Consumer Choices, Culture Jamming and Food. As well as the workshops the tour will also present their hilarious ‘Morning of Choices’ theatre performance, which encourages the audience to consider their own choices made during an average morning.

The Otesha Project (Australia) is seeking support from your community; any donations of food would be welcomed, and we’d love to engage with other sustainable community initiatives, so please contact Kate Tucker at info@otesha.org.au.

Notes to Editors:

• The Otesha Project (Australia): Cycling for Sustainably – reason to dream

• Currently seeking support as our 9 cycle team members come through your town:

East Coast Tour (19 February – 9 April).

• Contact:

• Email: info@otesha.org.au

• URL: www.otesha.org.au

I’m a cyclist myself and  I’m hoping to somehow improve cycling in some way shape or form, and if I am going to understand what cyclists needs or wants are, then I’ll need to get feedback from cyclists. I’m hoping you will be able to help me get some feedback from cyclists. My research relies heavily on the kindness of others to spare me some of their time,

If it is at all possible i was hoping you could circulate the below link for my 5min Survey to any willing members. Or if not to your members, just to yourself and any friends or family who also cycle. I don’t need a vast amount of responses, but the more i get the richer my report will be.

This is the Survey Link
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=19epa37rDRxe3VEbDIOGFQ_3d_3d

Thanks for your time!
Damien