When was the last time you saw a group of young women riding bikes together?
That's the question posed by Western Australia's peak cycling body WestCycle in a new program that aims to address low cycling participation rates for girls and women aged 15 to 20.
Rolling out next month, Bike Curious is a series of workshops designed to ask young women what is stopping them from getting on their bikes to travel to school or for recreation.
While it is common to see groups of teenage boys riding around the neighbourhood, Bike Curious communication lead Pam Boland said girls tended to lose interest in cycling when they hit their teenage years.
"But instead of trying to tell these girls what to do, we want to know why they're not doing it," she told Nadia Mitsopoulos on ABC Radio Perth.
"Do they feel unsafe in these spaces? Do they feel like they can't ask people how to ride a bike, or know how to ride a bike?
"If we want girls to have the same free-wheeling autonomy as boys, we have to ask them what needs to change."
Cycling is male-dominated
Recent research from Monash University found men outnumbered women two to one on the bike path.
Research fellow Lauren Pearson from the sustainable mobility and safety research group at Monash said while other cities around the world, including London and Paris, had experienced a 50 per cent increase in the number of women cycling during the pandemic, in Australia it remained a male-dominated activity.
Dr Pearson said a survey showed that the demands felt by many women made it harder to get on a bike.
"We know that women take different types of trips to men, they often ride different kinds of bikes and have different needs for the types of infrastructure that they feel comfortable in.
"So, trips not only to work and back, but also stopping at a shop on the way home, or if they are caregiving as well, being able to stop at a childcare or a school, on the way to work, or any of those kind of multi-stop trips."
Dr Pearson said women surveyed preferred more protection on bike lanes and infrastructure, especially when riding with children.
"Those wide lanes, if they are riding with children, that protected infrastructure just really limits those interactions with passing motor vehicle traffic," she said.
"That can be interactions like motorist aggression, but it can also be harassment."
"It also means that it limits the kind of bodily confidence and vulnerability that it takes to be riding in front of traffic as a woman as well."
Dr Pearson said there was an issue when it came to female representation in roles like transport and traffic engineers who made decisions around cycling infrastructure.
"In Australia, 85 per cent of traffic engineers are men, so pretty small numbers of women," she said.
"They need to make sure there are ways to actually embed, amplify and act on the needs of women within those infrastructure decisions, which don't currently really exist."
European cycling programs inspire
Ms Boland said WestCycle's Bike Curious program was inspired by similar programs in Ireland and Scotland called And She Cycles, which aimed to engage young women and discover barriers that prevented active transport.
"Those programs did a very similar thing where they wanted to engage young women in the questions and give them the right tools, the power, to be able to get on that bike, learn how to do it," she said.
"Because once you are on a bike, it's just joyful. That autonomy is fantastic."
Transport Minister Rita Saffioti recently announced $9.6 million in funding commitments for bike paths, which would result in 47 new projects delivered over the next two years, comprising about 38 kilometres of paths.
But South Metropolitan Greens MP Brad Pettitt said much more needed to be done.
"The fundamental issue we need to urgently address to get more women to ride bikes is the lack of safe cycling infrastructure including the lack of continuous bike lanes — and most importantly protected bike lanes," he said.
"There also needs to be better lighting on bike paths if we are to get more women riding more often."
Dr Pearson said her study noted women were more likely to cycle when using an e-bike but said no tax rebates were available yet in Australia.
Mr Pettitt said he was calling on the state government to subsidise the use of e-bikes to get more women cycling.
"E-bikes are still expensive, and it would be great if there was a subsidy for lower-income households, a simple and fiscally modest addition to an electric vehicle subsidy program would be the inclusion of e-bikes," he said.
