Cycling UK Forum

Thirdcrank, you're probably right very few if any of them are exclusive to women. On the other hand with the push to go green maybe we should be encouraging as many people as possible to get on their bikes

kwackers wrote:Wonder if they'll have a 'high performance' division, to catch wayward cyclists riding high perf bikes illegally.

That thought just made my day

I have the tinyest bit of sympathy for him as my personal bugbear is cyclists hurtling along pavements when the road is empty. That said the clip is laughable.

For what its worth as another female perspective on this...

I've ridden mountain bikes since I was about 5 or so, I am confident in traffic and have thrown my bike (not necessarily with me attached to it!) down the Cheddar Challenge track on a number of occasions (I should point out not while the competition was on going, we used to camp at the bottom of it each year) so am pretty confident putting my bike/myself back together after a spill. That said I've not found making the change to road riding at all easy.

I moved house about and after a knee injury decided to get a road bike to get fit rather than continue the damage I was doing to myself in the gym. Ok I thought, I know a bit about bikes, I've googled lots, I've read around the subject now lets give a couple of LBS's a go. Mistake no.1.

From a large chain shop who shall remain nameless to a number of small independent shops the attitude of those "helping" me stank. Patronising often didn't come close, and that was when they'd finished discussing the latest club ride with their collegues. Once they've established that you do know what a wheel is (yes there are two of them, they go round...) and that you know how to change gears they instead launch into technospeak. Ok I get the difference between something with 18 gears and 21 gears but I am no where near clued up enough to understand the relevance of the list of numbers you've just reeled off! So they go back to condecending. Now I could have just put it down to lousy sales technique in one store if I hadn't heard the same guy helping out a bloke earlier and explaining everything in accurate but understandable english.

If you want to get women into cycling these stores need to understand that we come in a range of flavours, from ditzy blond who needs the real basics explaining to those who know exactly what they're talking about. Being patronised or made to feel stupid is not a fast way to get people into it. Similarly the push to get women cycling seems to be coming from a health benefit perspective so the women you are targeting might not be the fittest. Again a hint to the bike stores I visited, that much testosterone kicking around isn't going to help, it intimidates. I'm sure you're amazing, that you cycled the Tour one legged, but quite frankly its not helping. It makes getting on a bike seem like something you have to be a marathon runner to do, not something you can work at.

Ok so I got my bike sorted... so far so well erm good.

My next bugbear I guess is something more for the manufacturers rather than something "fixable" by the cycling community. Cycle specific clothing, the sizing of. Now I'm not as thin as I should be, fair enough, but at a UK 14 I wouldn't consider myself to be massive. Gore clothing I'm an XL in and the leg warmers I can only just get to my knee never mind around my thighs. In fairness DHB has been a pretty good fit but I've not seen that on the shelf anywhere, I took a punt on wiggle. It might be a girl thing but it takes a pretty large sense of humour to keep trying on bigger and bigger sizes until something fits!

I really ought to mention at the end of that somewhat vitriolic rant that my local shop has been much nicer recently. That though was only really after I'd had the bike to bits myself to service it and needed a new stem as the original was too long. The fact that I had tackled it myself seemed to break the ice.

My top five (and in no particular order) for getting more women cycling then would be:
1) Friendlier or at least more helpful bike shops
2) Sensible sizing in clothing
3) Showers at work if you want us to commute (most of the women I know don't mind helmet hair/getting sweaty if we have somewhere to sort ourselves out when we get there)
4) Somewhere safe for us to keep our cycling gear/bike ie lockers/bike racks
5) More responsible drivers on the road

Alan, from my admittedly limited experience companies like that tend to buy their vehicles from somewhere near by so tend to be "traceable" via the first two digits of the registration ie the AY in this case is the code for the DVLA's Ipswich office. It might have been these guys:
D S Transport UK Ltd
Felixstowe, IP11 4AH
Tel: 01394607000
but without knowing their livery I couldn't say any better.