Monthly Archives: May 2019

Two people on a bike?

The bike movement is unstoppable and several factors promote it. We have the concern about the environment, the health promotion, the personal economy, the interest in living better and longer, the need to learn new issues regarding bikes, the attitude to develop relationships or the desire to make a better world. The positive impacts of riding a bike are impressive, although some people oppose them. Special attention is put on the car industry which has been making everything to stop bikes, from aggressive advertisements in order to discredit these vehicles to brainwashing other people and showing cars like a status symbol. Nothing further from the truth. Negative impacts of cars overwhelm positive ones.

Moreover, some politicians bent on putting a spoke in bike’s wheel since they dictate laws in some cases against logic. Take for example the Spanish law. At the time I am writing this post, one can read some points in it which would have been alright in the past century. One of them is the prohibition of carrying more than two people on a bike given that the second person uses a seat. Spain can look a lot of examples of countries which permit riding bicycles with more than two people on them. If only politicians treasure how cyclists go in central and north Europe. This way they would realize the present law is cochista and more suitable of the past century. But let’s think about the benefits of implementing such a law. Nowadays, some Spanish parents drive their children by car until school to distances up to 3 km generating traffic problems like double parking and increasing pollution in the nearness of education centers. Allowing riding bikes by more than two people would make more parents use it and the reduction of the car use.

Gamification

Gamification is the use of elements related to games into non-game contexts. It means making people feeling the positive impacts of playing games from video games to board games. A lot of companies have used this technique to attract the attention to the products and services they sell in the last years. They have looked for improving user engagement, increase organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy and more. Yet the world of bikes has been used it to improve its use through marketing strategies.

The public bicycle system Bicing from Barcelona, implemented it through an app to accumulate points by riding bikes, achieving challenges or checking the stations anchors. Riders won awards thanks to these points. The Move Us project was launched by the public bus company in Madrid and works similarly as Bicing except from the fact that it focuses not only on bikers, but also on people in general.

Strava Metro uses gamification to help bikers to establish a track when they need to, plan bike lines and analyze the city traffic.

Bike and genre

Bicycles can be enjoyed by both, women and men. Nevertheless, the way both genres behave when riding use to be different. Studies say women tend to ride at lower speed without competing between them (at least at no professional level) and appreciate much more landscapes in routes, whereas men tend to be more competitive with more testosterone, ride at higher speed and do not put so much attention to sceneries.

At psychological level, women do not usually speak openly to men regarding common problems they face when biking. On the contrary, they feel more confident to talk about their issues to other women. Moreover, car drivers act differently in arguments with a bike ridden by a woman or a man. If a woman is biking and a dispute with a male car drive takes place, the car driver acts as a beast feeling he has the right to yield or insult the woman even if he is wrong and malicious in his reasoning (supposing he has one since sometimes he has nothing to clutch at straws). In contrast, if a man rides the bike, the male car driver does not show himself so aggressively as he innerly know he could loss in a fight. This animal behavior is another example of the patriarchal society we suffer.

Here I have exposed some reasons because women need women-gender spaces to share ideas and empower themselves. Feminism is a global movement which looks for women to have the same rights as men. Biking is just another field in which come out. As a result of it, changes have been producing. For example, the Iberian Congress was initially opened to both genres, but in the Zaragoza edition they decided to give a space only to women with the creation of the Cyclist Women Meeting. This meeting was repeated in the Valencia edition and it was agreed to differentiate it with an appropriate event by women to women. The Iberian Congress is not expected to count with the Cyclist Women Meeting anymore, which will be an independent event held in a different place and date.