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news
Female cyclist in london red coat on steel road bike -copyright Simon MacMichael"Those who don't see themselves may feel cycling is not for them": Images of cyclists lack diversity and focus on cycling as leisure rather than transport, researchers suggest
Images of cyclists online lack diversity and may potentially contribute to "excluding many people from choosing cycling as an alternative form of transport", a charity has argued.
The analysis, commissioned by climate charity Possible and first reported by Forbes transport journalist Carlton Reid, saw the University of Westminster's Active Travel Academy in London look at 100 photos of "family cycling" from Google Images.
In general, it was found that images displayed "implicitly heterosexual-type nuclear families" and "there was a lack of diversity of representation in terms of disability, body size, and ethnicity", with the majority showing white, slim, non-disabled people riding in the countryside, away from urban areas.
Possible argues the lack of diversity could impact "those who don't see themselves" from thinking that cycling is for them, potentially "excluding many people from choosing cycling as an alternative form of transport".
"Those who don't see themselves in those images or who live in built-up areas may feel as if cycling is not for them because they are not also white, slim, or able-bodied and do not have widespread access to green spaces and calmer roads on which to cycle," Possible suggested.
The research concludes: "While inevitably limited (and only representing one facet of under-representation), the results are important and should raise concern about the narrowness of some of this representation. Specifically, there is a need for authorities and other organisations to widen the range of images that they use to show 'family cycling', which may well include generating and sharing their own images."
It was also suggested that Active Travel England "could take responsibility for sourcing and sharing a wider variety of such images, including those featuring people with larger bodies, different family structures, and more ethnic minority people cycling in locations that are clearly within the UK".
Last year, the Bicycle Association published the insights of its research into diversity in the cycling industry, releasing a report which said the senior leaders are "overwhelmingly white, heterosexual men", as well as noting "widespread experience of unfair treatment, including harassment".
That followed the Association, several months earlier urging the bike industry to change if it wants to grow and reach new customers.
The report found that women hold just eight per cent of cycle workshop roles, 19 per cent of customer-facing roles, and 40 per cent of the industry's administrative roles – though only a small handful of those have progressed to senior leadership positions.
Over 90 per cent of women face barriers to both entering and progressing within the sports industry, citing issues as discrimination, harassment, a lack of role models, difficulty finding a work-life balance, and a lack of training and targeted recruitment among the key "blockers" to progress.
Though no official data for the cycling industry exists at the moment, the report also noted that, anecdotally, Black, Asian, or people from ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the sector, as are individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds or with disabilities. There is also a lack of LGBTQ+ people joining or leading the UK bike industry, the report said.
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
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55 comments
Totally agree with this, and it's a point the research makes. But there seems to be quite a large disjunct between that and the research based on pictures of "family cycling", which (as I think you have said elsewhere) are likely to skew away from local authority / community group sites.
(As Sriracha noted this particular complaint is probably less about cycling.)
Not disagreeing on most of this - as we keep getting reminded humans are (mostly) very visual thinkers.
And social norms for groups are a real thing.
BUT as has been shown time and again while it's possible for almost everyone everywhere just to get a suitable machine and cycle (the great thing about cycling) ... that alone never leads to more than one or two percent of trips cycled. (Not counting cycling round the park here, or e.g. Zwifting...).
I think that's the first thing to fix. *
I do agree that there are some particular applications for "show the cyclists" to remind people / prime their imagination e.g. on our streets / in new development projects. (The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain did an interesting one of these). However I'd note that there are often now cyclists included in visualisations of "new places" which in reality are rarely or never seen when these are delivered... because simply pasting people into images does not make them appear (or make people put the conditions in place for that to happen).
With the social / psychological drivers - I think reality does win out to some extent. I think it may be actively demotivating if all the pictures I'm shown are at complete variance to my experience. Same if I suggest a bike ride to my peers and they all react with horror / skepticism / derision. I could be wrong - a look across other diversity issues would be useful - but note that for cycling it is not just a "representation" and culture barrier. It's also unpleasant and inconvenient to cycle many trips in the UK.
The stats from The Netherlands sort of show both sides. People who aren't "from" there cycle (far more than e.g. in the UK). But they do cycle less than people with Dutch heritage. (There are some charities with initiatives aimed at addressing these issues). To what degree is that "representation" or people's own culture / what they were used to elsewhere / if children the expectations their parents set? Ultimately if there aren't many people like you, you aren't going to see many people like you doing any activity, never mind cycling.
In the UK there are some specific laws (and guidance) we need to get amended (around "invalid carriages" / disability vehicles) but in NL at least the disabilities aspect is covered I believe (in design guidance, provision of transport options and ensuring everyone knows that the cycle path is for them too). (Some more images of all kinds of people using cycle infra.)
* Some things are simply necessary for most people to consider cycling. One is suitable spaces / routes to do so (and even to cycle round the park you've got to get to the park). Another is motor traffic speed and volume reduction. Connected - making cycling some trips attractive relative to driving.
82% of the people living in the UK are white, so most of the people who cycle will be white.
The UK is not the world. And google is not sufficiently clever to vary results based on your country -- I just tested this by connecting to a variety of countries with my VPN. So adjust your 82% figure for the worldwide percentage of white people, and the situation changes.
Google says otherwise:
When you search on Google, your results are customized to your current region. You can choose to see results for other countries from your computer and the Google app for Android.
TBH, I'd be astonished if it were not so. Maybe you forgot to change your browser/OS region settings?
Google is not Google Images.
As I said, I just tested this to confirm my point.
The question is does that apply to those who cycle? Most commuter/going to the shops cyclists live in cities and cities, especially London, is a lot less white than the shires.
Nevertheless, searching for 'family cycling' will inevitably find images associated with searches or websites aimed at family days out, and I think the websites of places that advertise themselves as a family day out will be weighted towards days out in the countryside, and specific country bike rides, rather than families travelling by bike to a day out at a London museum.
Isn't this more a question of Google or any other search engines algorithm not selecting images that reflect.the diversity of people cycling rather than there being a massively heavy preponderance of skinny white heterosexual families that cycle.
I haven't read the research in detail (obvs) but "family cycling" is a pretty blunt search. It's not surprising that it returns e.g. lots of images of rural cycling away from traffic - because most of the images appear on leisure and tourism sites. If you were Visit Hampshire, would you use an image of the urban commute through Southampton, or a leisure ride in the New Forest? (There may be a geographical flaw in this argument, but you get the point)
EDIT: I have now read it, it's here. I accept the general premise that cycling images are relatively undiverse; that people who don't see themselves in images of cycling may be in some way dissuaded; and therefore that it is desirable actively to increase diversity in images of cycling. But a search for "family cycling" does not, I would suggest, provide a representative sample of cycling images people might be exposed to. If, for example, you were trying to find about about local cycle routes, you're unlikely to come across and be dissuaded by these images because you wouldn't search for "family cycling" because it's untargeted.
Funnily enough, almost all car ads on TV show the car cruising down an empty boulevard or some unspoilt rural idyll, well away from any traffic! Somehow it does not seem to put off people who buy them for use in nose-to-tail traffic.
They searched for "family" cycling. Is the cause of their upset that they then found representations of kids having both parents in their lives, out together cycling, as a family? And, moreover, enjoying the health benefits. What were they hoping to find?
The referenced example was poorly chosen, but that doesn't change the point. Just perform a google images search for "cyclist". The enormous majority of results are skinny white males, with a few skinny white females thrown in. I scrolled many pages through those results, and other than a couple instances of Biniam Girmay and, oddly, a bunch of Daniela Larreal Chirinos, just about every person was skinny and white -- and those two professional bikeracers are skinny as well.
I've just done a Google of "family cycling" images - results below. Of the top eight images four are all white, one is in silhouette, two are non white and one is a mix of races. So I'm not sure their racial claim holds water. If anything, the representation seems contrived already compared to the reality I see.
I tried the same on DuckDuckGo which uses Bing as its engine, I believe. The top eight images were all white.
But the article is about "Google Images"
Yeah, I was just curious as to how different it might be
Which begs the question - who decides the ratios? The article holds "the authorities and other organisations" accountable. And, I notice DuckDuckGo does surface a few heavier builds.
You are missing the point. The inclusion of the word "family" is completely pointless and unnecessary.
And they're all wearing helmets, reinforcing the perception of cycling as dangerous.
Precisely -- and this is a far bigger problem than their skin-color or body-type. Which is why wearing a bicycle helmet -- that provides no useful measure of safety to the rider, and please be cautious before challenging that point, because the statistics are clear -- is deleterious to cyclist safety because it depresses cycling uptake, and the only thing since the Penny-farthing that has ever improved cyclist safety is "more cyclists". No one should be wearing a bicycle helmet unless racing or hucking off mountains.
If you are too frightened to ride without a helmet, you ought to be wearing a full-face motorcycle-rated helmet -- since those actually provide a (small) measure of safety to the wearer. Bicycle helmets, the dainty ~250g plastic hats that exhibit precisely the statistical signature of a placebo, are counterproductive. Which ought to surprise no one, after a few moments' thought. Motorcycle helmets are constructed to a far higher standard than bicycle helmets, with an order of magnitude more mass, and even still, only exhibit a very small benefit to the wearer, despite those crashes happening mostly at bicycle-attainable speeds ( and in most cases, it is the speed of the other vehicle that matters, since that's where the impact-energy originates, and that doesn't change between bicycles and motorcycles ). Other helmets constructed vastly better than bicycle helmets -- like American football and hockey helmets -- also struggle to exhibit any positive benefit to the wearer, despite enormously-smaller impact energies.
Wearing a useless bicycle helmet when riding to work, or school, or on-tour, or wherever else broadcasts the unmistakable message to observers that cycling is dangerous, and typically that it is sufficiently dangerous as to be suited only to daring young men and crazy old men. Almost nothing could be further from the truth, since cycling is not very dangerous statistically, but the drumbeat of this message results in most people believing that it is. And that reduces the number of cyclists, which prevents cycling from being even safer than it already is.
It also lays the ground for the converse, that cyclists not wearing a helmet are recklessly contributing to their own endangerment. Whenever a photo-op picture of some minor Royal or celeb appears, if they are helmetless then that becomes the sole focus of comment and they are castigated as irresponsible role models, and any pro-cycling messaging they may have been promoting is down the drain.
Wendover was iirc one of the places that undermined HS2 by demanding that all the money be spent on tunnels, wasn't it?
Place needs to be demolished and left as a wasteland monument to the importance of ignoring Nimbys
.
Speaking from a region that had furute growth plans planned around HS2, which vanished when the cowards in Government ran away from finishing the project.
Indeed, if you Google "cyclist" (not what the article did) then you get overwhelmingly sports cyclists. No surprise that they have the physique typical of their sport. If they had complained that cycling is overwhelmingly portrayed as a sport (and hence the "lycra clad" stereotype) rather than a leisure or utility endeavour then I might agree.
Perhaps you are confusing "sports cyclists" with cyclists who wear tight clothing -- the two are not the same at all. Just because someone wears a tight shirt, or pants, or even a jersey from a charity tour, that doesn't make them a "sports cyclist". The latter are people who race, or otherwise compete, on their bike, and google does return many of them, but it also includes a lot of people who appear to be riding recreationally in tight clothes.
But the point is, almost all of those images are of skinny white people, and just about the only examples of non-skinny people are on articles like this very one, observing that such pictures are incredibly rare.
I'm quite confident they already [made sure they] found precisely what they were hoping to find.
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