Vive Le Tour (event)
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011I will be speaking about the project at the event Vive Le Tour in Dalston on Monday – more details and flyer here. The event seeks to bring together cycling cultures in Hackney and London more generally, with film, music, and speakers.
Recently I’ve been spending more time on the project after my teaching-heavy term finished. I have been starting to go through the Hackney interviews, listening and correcting transcripts, cutting up and searching them and seeing what I find. Yesterday I looked at safety (and associated words) with my mind on a potential paper and found a lot more mentions of safety in women’s transcripts than in mens. Within each gender though there was a lot of variation – some men and some women described particularly bad experiences of harassment or conflict on the roads, while others did not.
Many of the mentions of safety in the Hackney transcripts didn’t refer to safety of people but of things – a number of the women we interviewed have kids and they tended to talk a lot about having to figure out how best to secure other family members’ bikes, which is not easy where storage space is limited and a family may have four or more bikes.
Ideally, you do not just secure the bike (“lock the wheels and the frame”) but all its bits, which may otherwise wander. Recently my own bicycle dynamo has been tampered with and this morning I discovered that someone had stolen my saddle, from my front yard. Again I was envious of the Rotterdam cycle parking I had seen last year…
