The Women’s Freedom Ride 2024

NEARLY a thousand women spent their Sunday cycling around central London at the weekend on the London Cycling Campaign’s Women’s Freedom Ride 2024 – and I was one of them.

The ride was to highlight the fact that London remains, despite recent strides in delivering more, safer cycle routes than ever before, a city where women cycle less than men. In Holland, women cycle more trips than men – cycling is well suited to the kind of trips women do in cities across the Netherlands, but also in London.

However, here, we face two major interconnected issues that means that while over half of trips in Holland are cycled by women, only a third are in London. The first is that despite those welcome recent strides, we’re still a long way from a truly interconnected network of safe cycle routes across London.

Women face abuse and aggression, says Eilidh Murray

We’ve got missing routes, we’ve got gaps in routes, and we’ve got substandard routes that give up at the tough bits.

And we know that women are disproportionately impacted by such issues compared to men – as well as the fact that women still do more journeys escorting children to school etc. and for those, those issues are a really big barrier to cycling.

On top of that, and likely in part because of a lack of women cycling, those women that do also face a barrage of abuse – at shocking levels – largely from male drivers. Nine out of 10 women LCC surveyed who cycle in London have faced abuse or aggression – with seven out of 10 facing such abuse on a monthly basis.

The abuse and aggression are such that one in five women surveyed had said they’d stopped cycling because of it.

For reasons of climate, health, pollution, congestion, road danger and more, it’s really important more people cycle when they can in London – but that simply won’t happen under such conditions.

The ride started with a petition signed by 5,000 asking the Mayor and the Met Police to do more to tackle cycle routes, social safety, local journeys and driver abuse.

And then we rode – joyously – through central London. Because while the issue of women cycling is a very serious one, impacting the freedom and mobility of women to move around our city freely, healthily, the Women’s Freedom Ride was anything but serious in tone – near a thousand women reclaimed our streets with an explosion of colour and music, with the ride including (in part due to it being co-organised by JoyRiders UK and Londra Bisiklet Kulübü) women in hijabs, women on penny farthings and women in amazing costumes and face paint.

I really hope there’s less need to cycle for women’s freedom next year because London acts on this issue, but I also really hope women across our area join us next year for an even bigger ride – it’s not just a worthwhile cause, but because it was a great fun day out.

Eilidh Murray is a co-coordinator of the London Cycling Campaign