The Infrastructure That Brings Women Back to Bikes

The Infrastructure That Brings Women Back to Bikes

If you look at where women bike as much as men – or more – the pattern is consistent: it’s never an accident.

Cities like Utrecht, Amsterdam, or Copenhagen didn’t get there with “women’s cycling days” or pink bikes. They got there by rebuilding streets so that everyday trips feel safe and practical for everyone.

In the first piece in this series – “Why Women Bike as Much as Men in Utrecht But Not Chicago” – we looked at the gender gap as a symptom of the overall system. Here, we flip the question:

What specific infrastructure actually brings women back to bikes?

The answer turns out to be remarkably consistent across studies, cities, and continents.

Women as an “indicator species” for healthy streets

Researchers and advocates sometimes call women cyclists the “indicator species” of a good bike network: when women, kids, and older adults are riding, the system is working. When you mostly see young men, the streets are still too hostile.

Across dozens of studies, three themes repeat:

1. Women are more sensitive to safety and comfort. Surveys show women report higher concern about traffic danger, driver behavior, and harassment than men, and are more likely to avoid routes they perceive as unsafe. [1]

2. Separated infrastructure matters more to women. Women strongly prefer protected lanes, off-road paths, and low-traffic streets – and their cycling rates jump the most when these appear. [2] [3]

3. Care-work trips shape women’s travel patterns. Women’s days involve more trip chaining – school, shopping, caregiving – which means more short, local trips on exactly the streets that are often the least protected. [4] [5]

If you design streets that work for that reality, the gender gap shrinks. If you ignore it, it grows.

1. Low-stress networks: protected lanes, calm streets, and safe intersections

The first, biggest lever is simple to state and hard to fake:

A connected network of low-stress routes from everywhere to everywhere.

The evidence is pretty blunt:

• In multiple North American cities, building protected bike lanes increased the share of female riders on those streets by 4–6 percentage points, even from a low baseline. [6]
• Survey work across cities like Austin, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, DC finds that women rate protected lanes as safer and more comfortable than men do, and are more likely to say those lanes made them ride more. [2]
• Macroscopic analysis across European cities shows that women’s cycling uptake is highest in safer environments, with more low-speed zones and fewer “blind” intersections. [7]

A women-friendly network usually has:

• Continuous protected lanes on main roads – not just a few showcase corridors, but a grid.
• Traffic-calmed local streets (20–30 km/h / 20 mph) where bikes mix with slow cars, not speeding traffic.
• Safe intersection design: set-back crossings, clear priority, small turning radii, and traffic signals that don’t force you to sprint across multiple lanes.

Low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and similar schemes can be powerful here. In London, LTNs cut road injuries by over a third within their boundaries, with no safety downside on boundary roads – exactly the kind of environment where more cautious riders, including women, feel comfortable cycling.

When the entire trip is low stress, women’s cycling rates climb. When stress spikes at every big intersection, women are the first to disappear from the saddle.

2. Safe in the dark: lighting, visibility, and social safety

A lot of women’s trips happen early in the morning or after dark – commuting, shift work, evening errands. For those rides, “Is there a bike lane?” is only half the question.

The other half is: “Do I feel safe on this route at night?”

Recent research highlights that:

• Women cite fear of assault or harassment in dark or isolated places as a major barrier to cycling at night, on top of traffic danger. [8] [9]
• In London, campaigners estimate that nearly a quarter of the cycleway network is “socially unsafe” at night due to poor lighting and isolation, causing many women to avoid those routes altogether in winter. [10]

So “women-friendly” cycling infrastructure has to think beyond paint and bollards:

• Good lighting along paths, underpasses, and junctions.
• Eliminating dead zones: avoiding long, isolated stretches with no passive surveillance from homes or businesses.
• Clear sight lines (no blind corners or dense vegetation that create ambush spots).
• Secure, visible bike parking near entrances, not tucked into dark corners.

For many women, the choice isn’t between “biking” and “not biking” – it’s between biking on a well-lit route with people around vs. not going at all, or taking a more expensive or time-consuming option.

3. Designing for care trips: schools, shops, and everything in between

A lot of cycling infrastructure is still quietly designed around a traditional male commute: home → work → home.

But women’s travel patterns are more likely to look like:

Home → daycare → work → grocery store → relative’s house → home.

Studies of travel behavior and “mobility of care” in Europe and North America show that women make more trips related to childcare, shopping, and caregiving, often chained together. [4] [5] When cycling doesn’t support those trips, women are structurally blocked from using bikes.

A network that brings women back will therefore prioritize:

• School streets: car-free or low-traffic streets in front of schools at drop-off and pick-up.
• Direct routes to supermarkets, clinics, and childcare, not just central business districts.
• Space for cargo bikes, trailers, and child seats: wider lanes, gentle gradients, and ramps instead of stairs.
• Safe crossings near where people actually cross – at mid-block desire lines, not only at huge intersections designed for cars.

If the only really safe bike route is a scenic detour that adds 20 minutes and skips the supermarket and school, it’s optimized for a solo commuter – not a parent doing three jobs at once.

4. Secure end-points: parking, storage, and “Will my bike still be there?”

Even if the ride itself is safe, the before-and-after experience can be a dealbreaker – and it lands harder on women.

Research and practitioner reports repeatedly emphasize:

• The need for secure, weather-protected bike parking as part of a genuinely useful network. [11]
• The extra mental load of wondering whether your bike (or child seat, or cargo bike) will still be there when you return.
• The particular vulnerability of people waiting alone at quiet racks or in dark corners.

Practical features that make a difference:

• Abundant, visible racks in front of shops, schools, clinics, and workplaces.
• High-security parking at hubs – guarded garages, smart lockers, covered compounds.
• Design that fits cargo bikes and adaptive cycles, not just one standard wheel slot.

If you want someone handling most of the household errands to choose a bike, you have to make the whole experience – including parking – feel reliable and low-risk.

5. Operations: speeds, enforcement, and driver behavior

Big gender-gap surveys keep coming back to the same basic point:

Many women would like to ride more – they just don’t trust drivers. [12] [13]

You can’t fix that with infrastructure alone. Operations matter too:

• Lower speed limits on urban streets, enforced by design (narrow lanes, raised crossings) rather than just signs.
• Serious enforcement against close passes and aggressive driving, including presumed liability or similar legal tools where possible.
• Clear rules around parking and loading so bike lanes aren’t de facto loading bays.

Infrastructure sets the stage; policy and enforcement govern how dangerous that stage feels day to day.

6. Tech and products: backup, not substitute

When streets are hostile, individual riders – especially women – end up assembling their own “personal safety stack”:

• Bright front and rear lights.
• Reflective clothing or accessories.
• Mirrors, cameras, and yes, loud horns that can cut through traffic noise.

Products like a car-horn-loud bike horn (e.g. the Loud Mini from Loud Bicycle) can give riders an extra tool to get a driver’s attention in an emergency, and many women riders rely on this kind of gear as a last resort. This aligns with what we see in our own data: demand for safety equipment is highest precisely where infrastructure is weakest.

But the hierarchy should be clear:

Infrastructure first, operations second, personal tech third.

If a city is serious about closing the gender gap in cycling, the goal is not “encourage women to armor up.” It’s to build streets that feel so predictably safe that you don’t need armor in the first place.

A simple test for women-friendly infrastructure

If you’re trying to evaluate whether your city’s cycling plan will actually bring women back to bikes, you can use a very simple checklist:

• Can a parent ride a continuous, low-stress route from home to school to the grocery store and back?
• Are those routes safe and inviting in the dark, with good lighting and people around?
• Is there secure, visible parking at every major destination, including for cargo bikes?
• Are speeds low and drivers constrained by design, not just by wishful thinking?
• Would someone who is risk-averse, time-poor, and carrying kids or bags still feel like the bike is a sane choice?

If you can honestly answer “yes” to those, the gender gap will start to close – not because women suddenly became “more into bikes,” but because the streets finally started working for the lives they actually lead.

References

1. Graystone: M. Graystone et al., “Gendered perceptions of cycling safety and on-street cycling infrastructure,” Journal of Transport & Health (2022).
2. Dill & Monsere: Jennifer Dill & Christopher Monsere, “Can Protected Bike Lanes Help Close the Gender Gap in Cycling?” PDXScholar (2014).
3. League: League of American Bicyclists, “Women on a Roll” (2013); “Increased Comfort = More Women Biking.”
4. Mogaji: E. Mogaji et al., “Equitable active transport for female cyclists,” Transportation Research Part F (2022).
5. Passman: D. Passman et al., “For whom the wheels roll: examining the mobility of care in the National Capital Region of the United States,” Frontiers in Sustainable Cities (2024).
6. Streetsblog NYC: “More Protected Bike Lanes = More Women Cyclists, New Study Shows” (2022).
7. BMC Blog: J. Brühl et al., “Keep building protected bike lanes if we want women to cycle more,” BMC Series Blog (2023).
8. Bean: R. Bean et al., “Natural barriers facing female cyclists and how to overcome them,” Journal of Safety Research (2024).
9. Lime: “Women’s Night Safety Report” (2023).
10. The Times: “Unlit London parks ‘stop women running and cycling in winter’” (2024).
11. Smart Cities Dive: “Infrastructure to Blame for the Cycling Gender Gap” (2013).
12. The Guardian: “Women put off cycling by safety fears and intimidating drivers – study” (2025).
13. Monash University: “What do women want? To ride a bike without fear of injury and harassment” (2023).