Listen to the WABA Women’s Forum & New Spring Interns

This post is part of the WABA Women Bicycling Project, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes.  To read about the project so far, check out Quick Release, the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here. At long last, we are proud to present the audio recording of our Regional Women’s Forum, held last December. WABA’s Women’s Forum Audio – December 12, 2011 This is the uncut audio from the event, and to help you identify the speakers, here is a list of the women who were on the panel:

Panel moderator

Jesse Cohn, WABA’s Women’s Bicycling  Advocacy & Outreach Intern

Panelists

Veronica Davis, Black Women Bike DC Heather Deutsch, DDOT Tracy Hadden-Loh, Rails-To-Trails Ellen Jones, DC Bicycle Advisory Council Katie Knight, Revolution Cycles Finnuola Quinn, Alta Planning & Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling Kate Ryan, WTOP news Elizabeth Sherwood, BicycleSPACE Katie Sihler, goDCgo

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Here at WABA, we are still thinking very much about this topic and the bigger questions it raises, as well as how it relates to the ideas that WABA talked about at our Regional Bike Summit in November. We will have some new projects here soon that will help further the conversation and keep the wheels turning. With that in mind, we would like to introduce our new Women’s Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach Interns: Keira Zitelman and Laura Jean Shane! We are very happy to have them both and we will have more details on their projects for the spring in the coming weeks. One idea that came up again and again during the planning for the forum and afterwards was that this is not a gender-based problem. There is a large proportion of the general public (as high as 60%) who define themselves as “interested in cycling” but with significant reservations–about safety, about buying a bike, about infrastructure, about sweatiness and showers–and this group includes men and women, the old and the young, and people of every description and demographic. These are the people who are on the cusp of taking up cycling for transportation, and at the core of our Women’s Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach project is the desire to determine what an organization with WABA’s reach and resources can do to convince women (and men) to take the plunge. You can join the conversation by signing up to receive emails about our Women’s Bicycling Advocacy & Outreach project and by posting on this thread on the Washington Area Bike Forum.