When City of Portland Transportation Planner Sean Doyle presented the 2023 PBOT bike counts at a meeting last week, he pointed to one figure in particular he feels is, “an important indicator of the quality of our bike network.” That figure was the number of women who ride.
Now, BikeLoud PDX is sharing a Women Biking in Portland survey that aims to learn more about women and cycling with an aim to achieve gender parity.
While a 50/50 split of men and women riding is the goal, Portland has never come close to that. When PBOT first began counting bicycle riders in the 1990s, the number of women on bikes was estimated to be about 20%. The number grew steadily, and between 2003 and 2021, PBOT found that about 31-32% of all riders were women.
But for the past two years, the number has dropped several percentage points and is now at around 29%, its lowest point since 2006. East of I-205, PBOT’s latest counts found that only 17% of bicycle riders are women. “Since the start of the pandemic, the gender split in people biking widened,” states the PBOT report.
The charts below are from PBOT’s 2022 and 2023 bike counts:
“Not to dampen on the recovery,” said PBOT Bicycle Advisory Committee Chair Ally Holmqvist at their meeting last week, “but the distribution between men and women… looks like we’re back at 2006. And that jumped out to me as starkly concerning.”
BikeLoud PDX volunteer Cathy Tuttle is also concerned and wants to see Portland set on the trajectory of cities like Osaka, Utrecht (where she lives currently), Copenhagen, and Tokyo where women make up 64%, 56%, 55%, and 50% of the cyclists respectively. Tuttle was impressed with “Women’s Freedom,” an initiative led by the nonprofit London Cycling Campaign. Part of that effort is a survey. Tuttle contacted LCC staff and learned they are interested in responses from other cities, so she created a nearly identical survey and is now urging Portlanders to take it.
Some of the questions Tuttle hopes to learn answers to include: Are there lived experiences of people who identify as women that make them more or less likely to continue biking for everyday work, errands, and recreation? Is it a lack of safe routes or harassment from drivers or something else that skews the balance toward fewer women on the road in Portland?
The survey has 22 questions (see a few of them above) and should take about 10 minutes to fill out. Please take this survey and consider sharing it with friends. Find it online here.