Exploring the Utilitarian and Non-Utilitarian Bicycling Behaviors of North American Women Cyclists

摘要

Background: Increasing bicycling is a common goal to increase physical activity. Studies have shown that women bike at a lower rate than men due to various factors; few studies have examined attitudes and perceptions of women cyclists at a large scale. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the bicycling behaviors of women cyclists across North America. Methods: We analyzed an online survey of 1,868 women cyclists in the US and Canada. The survey recorded respondents' bicycling skills, attitude, perceptions of safety, surrounding environment, and other factors that may affect the decision to bicycle for transport and recreation. We used chi-squared and non-parametric tests to examine the differences among groups of cyclists. We then utilized tree-based machine learning methods (e.g., bagging, random forest, boosting) to select the most common motivations and concerns of these cyclists. Results: We found that perception of safety (e.g., traffic, motorist behavior, lighting) were significantly different among women cyclists across age groups, bicycling skill, and education levels. Tree-based model results indicate that perceptions of safety, wayfinding, bicycle facilities, hills, and concerns about health were among the most important factors for women to bike for transport or recreation. The average classification error rates were around 9-12%. Cross validation performed on 20% of the sample resulted in moderate error rates (9-25%). Conclusions: Our study suggests opportunities for designing healthy cities for women. Cities may enhance safety to increase bicycling rates of women through investing in bicycle facilities and lighting infrastructure as well as enforcing speed limits and aggressive behavior from motorists. Our study also outlines how promotional and education materials designed for women in the non-bicycling group may help to change behavior. Future studies to compare bicycling behaviors of cyclists and non-cyclists of both genders would be useful.