Cyclry

Cycling news and humor from industry veterans

Spatial Modality and Abuse: Why Women Cyclists Disproportionately Die in London

How do culturally constructed female roles and external threats in public space play a part in the disproportionate number of female cyclist deaths from large vehicles in London from 1999 to 2014?

Introduction

The disproportionate number of female road deaths from large vehicles can be attributed to the way in which feminine spatial modality and the threat of abuse transforms their road experience, leaving them unlikely to perform the highly visible road positioning required to avoid this danger, nor to ride at night or traverse the quiet, less populated streets and alleys that would physically separate them from this particular danger. This essay addresses the three key concerns surrounding this discourse, as follows. Firstly, that feminine spatial modality sees women physically occupy less public space than men, socially conditioning them out of the behavior recommended to avoid such incidents. Secondly, that women’s reluctance to travel alone in dark or unpopulated areas because of fear of harassment or assault leaves women traversing heavily trafficked road routes. And thirdly, that public discussion and education around these incidents actively perpetuates such injuries by constructing women as an Other that absolves authorities from the responsibility to take measures to protect all road users.

Background Information

Contemporary discourse around London as a cycling city as part of its functional centrality in European urban projects (economically, if not culturally or geographically), has led to complicated discussions of an aberrant statistic that haunted its public transportation network for over 15 years: the hugely disproportionate number of women cyclists involved in fatal conflicts with Transport for London operated buses and privately-operated heavy goods vehicles (referred to collectively as “long vehicles”) on London’s streets. While female and male cycling casualties broadly reflect the participation levels of the respective groups, with female cyclists occupying 28% of urban cyclists and only 20% of the road casualties (Gov.uk, 2013; News.bbc.co.uk, 2015), fatal collisions between female cyclists and long vehicles are massive outliers in these statistics. Lack of transparency about many of these statistics makes it difficult to ascertain the full extent of the problem, yet even lowest estimates place women at 55% of these fatalities, meaning that, in conjunction with participation statistics, this threat is twice as likely to affect women (Urwin, 2015). It is important to note that these figures are relatively low, yet the year on year trend continues.

This aberrant statistic became the site of some soul-searching for the media, the Metropolitan Police, and Transport for London. The number of cycling deaths and the conditions from which they arise challenge London’s image as a cycling city, but, this paper argues, this statistic and the number of female road deaths in general are used in such a way as to protect this image, not challenge it. It is curious that even leaked Transport for London memos imply that behavior of female cyclists, rather than urban planning and hazardous road environments, is the cause of this disparity (Rudi.net, 2015).

On Sept 1, 2015, Transport for London implemented the Safer Lorry Scheme in conjunction with London’s borough councils and London Heathrow Airport in order to combine the “powers held by these bodies to deliver a simple, quick and complete solution across all roads in London” (Transport for London, 2015; the Guardian, 2015). The scheme mandates safety provisions on all long vehicles using London’s roads, and reflects the dual concerns of the London Cycling Campaign (which will be discussed at length later): a) fitting trucks with two additional sets of mirrors to increase visibility of cyclists; and b) fitting trucks with side guards that protect cyclists in the event of a collision. While this is an incomplete solution to road danger in general, it nonetheless represents a non-gendered solution to what this paper will argue is a gendered problem, in turn highlighting a way in which a hostile environment, rather than individual behavior, was the root cause of this particular danger.

Finally, in keeping with London’s function as a “cognitive model for all of us,” (Robins 2001, p. 488) I would like to provide a grounding for this topic that expands its usefulness beyond London’s streets. As contemporary American urban planning discourse shifts to accommodate “complete streets,” this paper highlights a clear problem that has cofounded London’s attempts to manage the shared use of its streets. In August 2015, a female cyclist was killed by a turning truck in similar conditions in Boston, Massachusetts (Boston.cbslocal.com, 2015), named in the same year as one of the United States’ best cycling cities (Boston.com, 2015). The city’s response was different to London’s, yet the event and its discussion highlight that the challenges of dealing with the urban road as a site of gender-specific danger remain a consistent obstacle on an international scale.

Spatial Modality

It is not the aim of this paper to argue that cyclist behavior is the cause for any recurring pattern of road incidents. Indeed, much of contemporary road danger reduction campaigning is built on the firm belief that environments are constructed in such a way to privilege particular road usages while excluding others (Uteng 2009; also Davis 1993, pp. 37-40). As such, this paper analyzes how the production and reproduction of femininity causes this environment to unexpectedly fail female cyclists at this particular point of conflict. In this section, I will discuss how feminine spatial modality largely adheres to a narrow personal space, with women physically occupying less space in public than men, and why this results in danger from long vehicles.

With its relatively uniform physical motion of propulsion (though gendered versions of the machinery do exist, with slightly different geometries), the bicycle appears at first glance a unisex leveler in urban motility: unlike with running, throwing, or hitting, it can be difficult to envision what the physical act of “cycling like a girl” would look like. Nevertheless, this must be our point of departure.

In her seminal text, Throwing Like a Girl, Iris Young argues that “feminine movement exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.” (Young 2005, p. 35) When considering the urban cycled street, I contend that one must consider this “inhibited intentionality” with which the feminine subject uses her space. The London Cycling Campaign offers two suggestions to avoid the disproportionate threat from long vehicles, both of which involve moving beyond the regular boundaries of cyclist road usage: the campaign advises cyclists to a) stay out of the space to the left of the lane when trucks are present (“the more inviting it looks the more dangerous it is”); and b) when stopped in front of a truck “position yourself well forward of the cab and to the centre [sic], so the driver can easily see you.” (Lcc.org.uk, 2015) Thus, one can consider that to adhere to this advice is to move beyond the normal bounds of bicyclist road occupancy both in motion and when stopped at junctions. It is no doubt that the combination of both factors presents the most serious risk: a cyclist occupying the concealed space ahead of a truck cab when stopped, and then occupying the left curb of the lane when in motion, is most at threat from a left-turning long vehicle. This act of occupying only the acceptable bounds of road space, rather than infringing on the area used by cars, is common bicycling behavior, yet the contingent acts of moving beyond this restricted space in order to preempt or defend against potential road danger is less familiar to many women, because “a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space.” (Young 2005, p. 33) The double hesitancy Young describes frames feminine spatial modality in direct opposition to the advice for safe bicycling motility when sharing road space with long vehicles. One may thus consider the social construction of femininity, and specifically feminine bodily comportment, as a direct cause of this phenomenon of disproportionate road violence. London’s roads are a gendered space that contains a danger that results in the seemingly unlikely and aberrant statistic that the vehicles that make up 5% of motor traffic make up 50% of all cyclist fatalities (Lcc.org.uk, 2015), the majority of which are women.

As such, it becomes clear that the female cyclist on a public road is not only a physical vehicle, but also “a vehicle of gender-based emotions and reactions” (Papadopolulou, 2014, p. 2). Young’s double hesitancy of feminized bodies, born of bodily comportment and lack of mirroring, constructs a reactive female cyclist, who is less confident in her desire to proactively dominate road space in the way that the LCC advises. In this sense, their “no matter how inviting” qualifier seems especially apt, though seemingly insufficient to encourage new female cycling behaviors.

The ontology of femininity is a gendering process based on habit and experience, bound to cultural meanings that are performed and reproduced through social transactions (Sullivan, 2001; building on Butler 1990, pp. 129-130), leaving the female body (particularly when used normatively) as “a material reality that has already been located and defined within a social context” (Butler & Salih, 2003, p. 28). Young’s discussion of the ways this body has been defined, especially with regard to the immanence overlaid onto the female body and the ways it reproduces self-identifications of objectification (Young 2005, pp. 36-39) allows insight into the way this causes women to use space and their bodies with caution, allowing movements to act through them (Ibid, p. 34). While there is no uniform expression of this modality, we can understand that it largely adheres to a narrow personal space, in which women physically occupy less space than men, and are also be less committed to using their entire bodies to perform actions.

This phenomenon sees women less likely to take the preventative measures that greatly improve chances of exiting a point of conflict with a long vehicle without incident. Further, leaked memos from Transport for London explicitly attribute these particular road deaths to internal statistics that demonstrate women are less likely to break the specific road laws—particularly those around red lights—which would simultaneously remove them from the point of conflict and increase their visibility in the public space (Rudi.net, 2015). If we understand these issues as part of a larger gendered project, we can see that women are, in general, unwilling to commit to the physical actions of road dominance that would make them hypervisible on the urban street and therefore less likely to be forced to share diminishing road real estate with large vehicles.

Finally, it is important to point out that while many authors in this section have discussed feminine spatial modality in terms of sporting activity, this paper has resisted such an approach, first because one of the key challenges of broader road safety discourse has been to separate recreational cycling from transportational cycling, and secondly because there is little in any of the data analyzed for this paper that suggests female athletic ability—whether ascribed to physical traits or feminine socialized traits—has any impact on road safety (though the third section will argue that this is an underlying implication within the public discussions of this phenomenon). However, Garrett (2005, p. 142) does take a more literal view of the body, linking bodily appearance to the construction of the self and claiming it as the site of an active self-identifying process. In the sense that fitness is secondary benefit of bicycle commuting, and also in the sense that bicycling is in a very literal sense a way to produce or develop the contemporarily desirable female bodily shape, I argue that the sport-like motions of transportational cycling share many of the gendering and self-identifying processes evident in the more explicit sporting environments discussed by Garrett (2003) and Young (2005).

Visibility

While timidity is a word common to both Young’s (2005, p. 34) discussion of women’s sporting behavior and the Evening Standard’s (2013) description of women’s urban cycling behavior, in the next section I will argue that far from being “timid,” London female cyclists are in fact less likely to decide to physically separate themselves from the conflict points that cause road danger to cyclists from long vehicles. Due to learned habits of personal safety, women reject the options to avoid this road danger, which includes cycling at night, and also the act of taking quieter roads, parks, and alleys during the day. This behavior is in direct contrast to ways male cyclists navigate such urban spaces, as they are more likely to travel on “non-built-up-area roads with their different reported casualty and fatality rates,” avoiding points of high conflict. (Davis 1993, p. 24). Women’s reluctance to travel alone in dark or unpopulated areas due to fear of harassment, abuse, or assault, then, can be considered a vital component of their very real road threat, leaving women traversing heavily trafficked road routes as part of a negotiation that weighs the threat to their bodies as women against the threat to their bodies as cyclists.

Visibility in this situation is certainly a different type of visibility to that recommended by the London Cycling Campaign to reduce the threat from turning trucks. This is, paradoxically, at once a desire to both be seen and be invisible: first in the issue of personal safety as a woman to place oneself in a public space where any infractions on one’s body are visible and can thus be prevented, and secondly in the desire to not draw attention to oneself lest such abuse be inflicted on one.

That these habits of self-preservation carry over into feminine cycling behavior is not simply common sense: by interpreting Beecham and Wood‘s (2014) analysis of the gendered usage of the public London Cycle Hire Scheme (LCHS), we are able to see how this behavior manifests on London’s streets. However, before we proceed it is important to understand the limits of this study. While their analysis, based on over a million bicycle journeys tracked from usage behaviors of registered members of the LCHS, expands the boundaries of bicycle commute reporting, it nevertheless remains an incomplete portrait due to the nature of the data reporting methods, and is ultimately reliant on interpretation, especially with regards to the routes cyclists use. (The LCHS only tracks a cyclist’s departure and arrival stations, and not where the bicycle travels between these stationary points.) Nevertheless, there are two key data points within their analysis that point to the fact that the habits instilled in women to avoid danger of abuse, harassment, and assault remain in place as a direct influence on feminine cycling behavior.

First, Beecham and Wood find that women are far more likely to use the scheme in Central London than in the “semi-rural communities” [sic] of the outer boroughs (Beecham & Wood 2014, p. 10). Naturally, one must approach this information with some hesitancy: first because the outer boroughs of Greater London require longer journey distances point-to-point than the more tightly-packed areas of Central London (and cycling in these areas is therefore less practical), and secondly because the density of LCHS stations is much greater within Central London. Nevertheless, there remains a discrepancy with male identified riders, who exhibit far less of a predilection to be discouraged by these apparent impracticalities. Most importantly, the fact that this data demonstrates that the quieter roads of Greater London are not a bustling haven of female cyclists, and are in fact significantly less used by women than the busy streets of Central London, indicates that the issue is not feminine trepidation toward interacting with traffic.

Second, Beecham and Wood highlight with some bemusement that women are vastly more likely to make their cycled commutes in the morning than at night (Ibid, pp. 16-17). Again, we must be cautious, because this phenomenon can naturally only occur within the bicycle sharing LCHS, rather than commuters as a whole: without such a service, and despite the proliferation of folding bicycles, it would seem a terribly inconvenient habit to cycle to work only to make alternative arrangements to return home each day. However, this statistic, and others centered around busy and quiet times, highlight that men are actually more likely to ride outside of peak commuting times (Ibid, p. 22). Women appear to avoid traveling at times when it is dark or when roads are less busy. We may consider that not riding at night is a choice to avoid road danger, yet the apparent lack of female cyclists on quieter, less populated roads suggests that the issue is not an assessment of the potential danger to the female cyclist’s body as a cyclist, but instead a conscious avoidance of the potential danger that threatens her body as a woman.

Given that women are statistically less likely to ride at quieter (or darker) times and in less busy locations, it therefore seems prudent to question the narrative perpetuated by the media and by TfL that the female cyclist is timid rather than a participant in a gendered habit of bodily comportment who is in fact more, not less, likely to choose to travel in busy areas at busy times. This conclusion is in conflict with the interpretations of Beecham and Wood, who argue rather unconvincingly—using the test rides around parks made by prospective members the scheme wasn’t able to retain, which skew the women’s figures more than the men’s—that men in general may be more likely to take major thoroughfares. Adjusting for geographic proximity to LCHS locations (i.e. London residents) and heavy usage (i.e. commuters), the gender divide in apparent route choice diminishes to the point of becoming functionally indistinguishable.

Bearing this behavior in mind allows us to consider its influence on the disproportionate number of female casualties at the wheels of long vehicles in London. Quite simply, because of gendered habits to avoid external threats, which have continued on into women’s urban cycling behavior, women are more likely to ride their bicycles at the times when, and in the places where, long vehicles operate. While feminine spatial modality is often crudely interpreted as timidity while navigating the cycled road, and a lack of the bravery to do the actions required to avoid road danger, the truth is that far from being “timid,” London’s female cyclists are in fact less likely than men to decide to physically separate themselves from such conflict points.

Discourse of stasis

Returning to a point made in part one, campaigners for road danger reduction are keen to construct a discursive demarcation between recreational cycling and transportational cycling in order to avoid this danger being discussed as a sporting, rather than urban planning, issue. It should be clear from this text so far that there is nothing to suggest a causal relation between road danger and any existing discrepancies between male and female athletic ability. However, this remains an underlying implication within discussions of this phenomenon. In this section I will argue that public discussion and education around these incidents does not prevent such injuries, but instead perpetuates them by constructing an Othered road user that absolves Transport for London and other authorities from the responsibility to take infrastructural measures to protect all road users.

To understand this othering process, we must first consider the demographics of London’s commuting cyclists. The Office for National Statistics (Ons.gov.uk, 2015; and also Ctc.org.uk, 2015) provides a very clear portrait of the London cyclist: white, male, between the ages of 20 and 50, with above-median income. Cyclists are also more, not less, likely to own a car than non-cyclists (Publications.parliament.uk, 2015). This is, to some extent, a contradiction with common British discourses about cyclists being scofflaws unworthy of their one-directional access to public road funds (Philips, 2012). The discrepancy between discourse and demographic data is in fact a cause of the large amount of discussion that has surrounded long vehicle fatalities involving women. Isolating and dissecting such an aberrant-looking, yet constantly recurring, statistic, allows road danger to be framed as a gender problem affecting women (which is not, in a broad sense, dissimilar to the aims of this paper, yet is approached in a very different way, and with very different intent). This in turn appeases the privileged demographic who may otherwise demand large-scale infrastructure changes to protect them from such dangers, without upsetting those who have negative perceptions of cyclists.

Whether it manifests as a conscious decision or not, there has been a vested interest in sustaining this gendered danger through neglect or passive educational models. For example, one of the “solutions” TfL and the Metropolitan Police have relied upon has been “Exchanging Places Events,” which offer women the choice to sit in a stationary truck cab (Content.met.police.uk, 2015). This gendering of road danger allows for two simultaneous, contradictory factors: a stasis in the urban planning required to reduce all road danger, and the continuation of London’s triumphalism as a cycling city. In this sense, the mystery behind the deaths (and the deaths themselves), create a Foucauldian silence around the broader, constant road danger that all cyclists encounter in London, and constructs an environment where cycling ability, framed around gender, becomes synonymous with road safety. Because ability, rather than infrastructure, is considered a cause of these disproportionate female deaths (and so, also, less capable, feminized male cyclists), TfL is absolved of undertaking expensive, and politically divisive, action.

The process of othering road users is not new. Robert Davis describes how Asian drivers in the United States and women drivers in the United Kingdom have historically been categorized as bad drivers in not especially subtle ways (Davis 1993, pp. 23-26). Davis in particular highlights the ubiquity of such language, arguing that gender is “not a significant variable for most professional road safety analysts. However, it constantly appears in conversation among lay people.” (Ibid, p. 24) Bounding particular road users together in a uniform categorization perceived to be less capable of traveling safely is beneficial for those who exist outside these bounds. The result is the construction of a silent stasis that bounds innate culpability at a group level, and personal error at an individual level for those outside this category.

Davis is especially critical in discussing this method of avoiding tackling road safety issues, describing the construction of “categories of deviants who can be scapegoated for their antisocial behavior.” (Ibid, p. 25) This construction not only leads to negative perceptions, lack of sympathy, or the physical threat described in the previous section, but actively absolves institutions such as TfL and the Metropolitan Police from their responsibilities to prevent such danger. Davis concludes succinctly:

Isolating particular minority groups is an absolutely classic way of maintaining the status quo by refusing to identify problems as being closer to home—it is always easier to criticize small groups than to generate and support the much more necessary self-criticism.

(Davis 1993, p.26)

While female cyclists do not contain the potential to cause harm to others in any significant way, we can nevertheless consider that through the continued discussion of the danger women face on London’s streets, the discursive category inhabited by London’s female cyclists is Othered. Death, paradoxically, becomes the reason not to prevent death, framed in such a way that repositions culpability away from those most responsible for enacting change. By suggesting that cycling road danger is a female problem, the media, the Metropolitan Police, and TfL set in motion a narrative which in turn leads to conclusions that women are dying because of their timidity or their cycling ability. This, naturally, plays to the ego of the largely privileged male demographic of urban cyclists in London, despite the fact that statistically it is their group that makes up a disproportionate amount of the overall cycling casualties (Urwin, 2015; Gov.uk, 2013). This is associational public space in a very literal sense; men acting together in tandem, to paraphrase a criticism of Arendt’s view of public space that is elaborated on succinctly by Benhabib (2011, p. 102), to maintain “concepts of differentiated gendered mobility” that “challenge liberal notions of freedom [and eliminate] possibilities of travel” (Uteng 2005, p. 1057). Intentionally or not, a stasis is created, which perpetuates this particular road danger for women, but also maintains an unequal and unsafe road environment for all cyclists.

Challenges

It is important to note that by necessity this is an analysis of environments and the interactions they foster. While extensive data has been utilized to support and develop the argument, it is very difficult to gather accurate data about urban bicycling behavior and habits. This is equally true of nuanced information about the specificity of individual decisions leading to the causation or avoidance of particular road conflicts. As such, certain presumptions must be made. This is, undoubtedly, the greatest obstacle in tackling this complicated issue, and it will remain insurmountable until large-scale data gathering undergoes a significant sea change overhaul. The greatest quantity of my data does allow for a lot of depth in analysis, but it is also borne of a very particular usage scenario: the millions of journeys assessed only include those involving London’s Cycle Hire Scheme, effectively focusing analysis around a number of hubs within the city, and as such over-representing certain routes and usages. The total lack of bicycle owners in this group (who may behave differently) implies a huge number of journeys that are entirely unaccounted for. Unfortunately, the majority of such road casualties occur to people operating personal bicycles, occupying this comparatively unmeasured group.

Further, applying theoretical frameworks to material phenomena can often lead to a conclusion that lacks the material change required to alter the conditions it describes. This fact, sadly, is true of this paper, though I hope it will contribute another layer of understanding to a complex issue, especially when considering the discourses that simultaneously drive awareness of this epidemic of female deaths while making little attempt to change them.

Finally, this paper relies on a traditionally binary understanding of gender, and presumes a relatively normative expectation of gender expressions: I have explored how feminine spatial modality produces the conditions that cause the urban cycled road to present a gendered danger in the specific road conflicts involving women and long vehicles, but the bounds of normative gender performance are narrow, and the assumption that all victims of this particular road danger conform in identical ways is convenient but not quantifiable in any meaningful way. An additional point is that, given the participation statistics, one may already consider the act of urban cycling to be a non-normative expression of gender. This is a basis for much more study within this arena, but one that sadly falls outside the scope of this particular paper.

Conclusion

To conclude, this paper has addressed why feminine spatial modality makes specific usage conflicts on London’s roads especially dangerous to women, why women persist in using them despite awareness of this threat, and finally how discussions around this phenomenon have removed the impetus to create meaningful change within this urban environment.

That London’s streets foment a gendered risk is an unavoidable truth, and knowing the way in which female cyclists use these spaces is a vital stage of changing the urban environment to remove this danger. This paper has discussed in detail the three overlapping phenomena of gendered habits that have left the urban street manifested as a gendered space, intending to provide a useful insight into the complex ways gender performance has a crucial influence across a wide range of unexpected arenas within the bounds of lived experience, yet it is important to understand that explaining why this gendered road danger from long vehicles exists is not a solution to the problem in and of itself. It is important sometimes to step outside the narrow bounds of focused study: the simple truth is that no such comparable phenomenon exists in countries that have constructed the separated infrastructure that minimizes the threat of road danger to all vulnerable road users (Yang et al., 2010). It may be that in this case, gender-specific solutions are not required at all.

Bibliography:

  • Beecham, R. & Wood, J. (2014). Exploring gendered cycling behaviours within a large-scale behavioural dataset. Transportation Planning and Technology, 37(1), pp. 83-97
  • Benhabib, S. (1993). Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space. History of the Human Sciences, 6(2), pp.97-114.
  • Boston.cbslocal.com, (2015). Police Find Driver After Fatal Bicycle Accident In Boston. [online] Available at: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/08/07/bicyclist-killed-by-truck-in-back-bay-hit-and-run/ [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Boston.com, (2015). Boston, Cambridge ranked among best cities for biking. [online] Available at: http://www.boston.com/real-estate/news/2015/05/14/boston-cambridge-ranked-among-best-cities-for-biking/v7zW47rkfLTXCGDw9PPG6K/story.html#sthash.3ve7ushm.cTEvfS9m [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.
  • Butler, J. and Salih, S. (2003).Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault. The Judith Butler Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
  • Content.met.police.uk, (2015). Exchanging Places Events – Metropolitan Police Service. [online] Available at: http://content.met.police.uk/Article/Exchanging-Places-Events/1400007586440/1400007586440 [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Ctc.org.uk, (2015). CTC Cycling Statistics. [online] Available at: http://www.ctc.org.uk/resources/ctc-cycling-statistics [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Davis, R. (1993). Death on the streets. Hawes, North Yorks: Leading Edge Press.
  • Evening Standard, (2013). Women, ride for your life: how to cycle safely in London. [online] Available at: http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/health/women-ride-for-your-life-how-to-cycle-safely-in-london-8855636.html [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Garrett, R. (2003). Gendered bodies and physical identities. In: Body Knowledge and Control: Studies in the Sociology of Physical Education. London: Routledge.
  • Gov.uk, (2013). National Travel Survey statistics – GOV.UK. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-travel-survey-statistics [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • the Guardian, (2015). Lorry safety scheme in London aims to increase protection of cyclists. [online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/01/lorry-safety-scheme-in-london-aims-to-increase-protection-of-cyclists [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Lcc.org.uk, (2015). Advice for cyclists to stay safer around lorries. [online] Available at: http://lcc.org.uk/articles/advice-for-cyclists-to-stay-safer-around-lorries [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • News.bbc.co.uk, (2015). BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Are women cyclists in more danger than men?. [online] Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8296971.stm [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Ons.gov.uk, (2015). 2011 Census Analysis – Cycling to Work – ONS. [online] Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/cycling-to-work/2011-census-analysis—cycling-to-work.html [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Papadopoulou, A. (2014). ‘Gendered Spaces and Participation in the Public Realm’, Spaces & Flows: An International Journal Of Urban & Extra Urban Studies, 4, 2, pp. 1-10, SocINDEX with Full Text, EBSCOhost, viewed 21 September 2015.
  • Philips, M. (2012). Arrogant, abusive and oh-so smug – why do so many cyclists think they’re above the law?. [online] Mail Online. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2242003/Arrogant-abusive-oh-smug–cyclists-think-theyre-law.html [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Publications.parliament.uk, (2015). House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 09 May 2011 (pt 0001). [online] Available at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110509/text/110509w0001.htm [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Robins, K (2001), To London: The City beyond the Nation, British cultural studies, eds Morley, D. and Robins, K, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 473-493.
  • Rudi.net, (2015). Women cyclists are more likely to be killed in traffic: TfL suppresses report | RUDI – Resource for Urban Development International. [online] Available at: http://www.rudi.net/node/16395 [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Sullivan, S. (2001). Living across and through skins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  • Transport for London, e. (2015). Safer Lorry Scheme – Transport for London. [online] Tfl.gov.uk. Available at: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/freight/safer-lorry-scheme [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Urwin, R. (2015). Why are female cyclists more vulnerable to London’s lorries?. [online] Evening Standard. Available at: http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/why-women-seem-to-be-more-vulnerable-around-traffic-blackspots-in-london-10341420.html [Accessed 13 Dec. 2015].
  • Uteng, T. (2009). Gender, Ethnicity, and Constrained Mobility: Insights into the Resultant Social Exclusion. Environment and Planning, volume 41, pp. 1055-1071
  • Yang, L., Sahlqvist, S., McMinn, A., Griffin, S. and Ogilvie, D. (2010). Interventions to promote cycling: systematic review. BMJ, 341(oct18 2), pp.c5293-c5293.
  • Young, I. (2005). Throwing Like a Girl. On female body experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.