Women Join Mexico City's Cycling Revolution Whitney Eulich - The Christian Science Monitor
go to original April 30, 2013

Women wearing dresses and high heels ride bicycles down a street in Mexico City March 9. About 300 women wearing high heels and dresses participated in the event as part of activities to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8 and to promote the use of bicycle for women living in the city, according to the organizer 'Women in Bike.' (Bernardo Montoya/Reuters)

MEXICO CITY - Scores of bikers pedal by the Parque España in Mexico City each weekday morning, sporting suits, wearing backpacks, and in some cases balancing a mug of coffee in one hand.

Commuting by bike has become increasingly popular in the traffic-choked capital of 22 million since the creation in 2010 of dedicated bike lanes and a bike share program. Pay attention, however, and you'll see that the bikers are mostly men. Are women missing out?

A little more than 80 percent of Mexico City’s cyclists are male, according to a 2012 study by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). But the number of women pedalers has started to slowly rise, increasing by 2 percent between 2010 and 2011. And peer-taught classes may have something to do with it.

Every Sunday, the city’s main thoroughfare, Reforma, is closed to vehicular traffic and taken over by bikers, runners, and rollerbladers. Laura Bustos Endoqui comes out each weekend for her volunteer “Sunday job” of teaching between one and three women to ride bikes. “I teach them balance, how to pedal, how to break. It’s not about capability, but overcoming the fear,” Ms. Bustos says.

Some of Bustos’s students never learned to ride when they were kids; while others learned but haven’t tried for more than two decades.

Read the rest at The Christian Science Monitor

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