*FREEDOM FIGHTER *
*Leigh Anne Parry is on a two-wheeled mission to empower and improve the lives of women by giving them the skills to safely, independently and confidently join Winnipeg’s male-dominated bicycle-riding community*
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/cover-pedal-pushers-ins...
I’M coasting down the bike lane on Sherbrook Street on a plain, black Dutch bike, carrying Plain Bicycle Project co-manager Leigh Anne Parry on my rear panier rack.
She guides me through traffic and along the sidewalks as we make our way to Gordon Bell High School for a bike lesson, the same kind she gives to dozens of women in their 20s and older who are interested in learning to ride.
Normally the lessons, currently on pause thanks to COVID-19, would take place in the schoolyard at Ecole Victoria-Albert. On this fall morning, however, we coast languidly along the path looping Gordon Bell’s soccer field.
“These bicycle lessons have been in the back of my head for a while now,” Parry explains.
Inspired by a woman in the Netherlands for whom bike lessons and Dutch bikes are a lifetime project, Parry — whose work with the Plain Bicycle project stretches 3 ½ years — decided earlier this summer to begin running sessions to make cycling more accessible to the Dutch bike’s key customers: adult women.
“It’s something that can be freeing for the whole family,” she says. “Empowering women empowers the whole family’s ability to take different modes of transportation.”
First things first: balance. We start sitting on the bike seats, feet flat on the ground, and begin to walk. The trick is to get comfortable balancing by gaining momentum and lifting the feet, practising little coasts down the path.
For me, most confident on a hard-tailed mountain bike, the gentle ride and upright stance is a comfortable change of pace. It’s part of the reason why, Parry says, the bikes appeal to new riders.
Parry, 33, got invested in biking in university, she says. She grew up outside the city, but moved into Winnipeg for school and was gifted a bike to ride around. After using it as her main mode of transportation for some time she got a fast-paced job as a bike courier.
“I started to ride with a particular kind of work purpose, I got to explore the city a lot, I got more comfortable and confident riding a bicycle, especially in traffic,” she says.
“Then I was working as an urban farmer and had a big trike that I would deliver vegetables on; I’ve always integrated bicycles into my work life because I find it very useful and I think it’s a good idea.”
Using the bike as a tool for her everyday activities, Parry became familiar with the city’s strengths and weaknesses in bike infrastructure, and began to notice the biking community was dominated by men who felt comfortable enough to weave with traffic on the city’s busy streets.
“Women are sort of an indicator species for how good your infrastructure is in a city,” Parry says.
“Women statistically take less risks because they’re usually depended on a lot more and their stakes are higher, and they feel less confident being an aggressive rider in among the traffic.”
In the Netherlands, she explains, 60 per cent of bike-riders (she prefers to avoid “cyclist” as a term) are women. In Winnipeg, by contrast, women make up closer to 30 per cent of the cycling crowd.
That number is something Parry is slowly setting out to change. Biking is more convenient for women, she says. It’s a quick way to “trip-chain,” or make multiple stops close together: dropping the kids off at school, visiting the grocery store and getting to work, for example.
“It’s also something that can be really empowering and freeing for women to have that sense of independence and to be able to do all of those errands and runs on their own, on their own transportation, quickly and easily,” Parry says.
Lately she’s seen an “inspiring” uptick in older women — those over 50 — learning to ride, especially with the comfort and ease of the “omafiet” or “grandma bike.”
“Our intention is to integrate this kind of bike into the market,” Parry says.
“That message, I think, landed with older women who had been thinking and considering their abilities and maybe a shift in their life a little bit... it creates this other sense of independence.”
After we practise our balance, including getting our feet on the bottom and top pedals while we coast and pedalling backwards to brake, Parry explains the mounting and taking- off process. With one foot on the top pedal, we slip up onto the seats and press down, pushing us through another curve in the path.
Parry explains that in her class sessions, usually attended by 15 to 20 people each, the women she teaches often begin to help each other; once they’ve mastered a stage they support one another, building confidence and camaraderie among the avid learners. Most learn to ride in one or two sessions, she says.
“It’s very beautiful — people are helping each other out, they’re teaching one another how to ride. They were coming in there saying they weren’t feeling confident and they were scared, and then they leave feeling really excited that they were successful at the stage where they’re at,” Parry says with a smile.
“People are very courageous and ready to go.”
From there, riders move on to Phase 2, which consists of turning, lifting
hands off the handlebars to signal and shoulder checks. Normally Parry would teach this on an obstacle course until riders can confidently do all three at once.
They’re key steps for city riding, where bikers need to navigate traffic, bike lanes and more to stay safe on the roads. Parry wants to instil confidence, so the women she teaches can start integrating cycling into their day-today lives.
“The next steps are going to be really exciting because when they start to be able to use it for their transportation, when I see them riding around downtown with their kids on their back, that’s not only going to be great for them but also for Winnipeg,” she says.
“If you see more people on a bicycle — and not just white men in Speedos and helmets — you can start to see yourself riding a bike, so it changes other people’s lives, too.”
The more people, and particularly adult women, who become empowered to ride, the safer the streets will become, Parry explains.
“I think when you’re learning to ride a bike, especially in a place that is not bike-friendly, you might end up thinking that you can’t do it and you’re the issue,” she says.
“But you should be allowed to get to your grocery store easily and safely, even if you’re not a confident rider; you should be able to do it beside somebody that you’re teaching how to ride a bike, or your kids or your partners, these are sort of normal and common practices in a place where you see most people riding a bike. So keep your imagination open, and your ability to see the possibility of change within your city and ask for it and demand it.”
Part of Parry’s cycling classes have involved working with central Winnipeg groups such as the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba, teaching cycling skills to moms, newcomers, youths and those typically not visible in the cycling world.
Abiba Salamu attended three of Parry’s sessions through IRCOM this summer. Never having biked before, she can now ride around a little on her own, and is able to help others start pedaling, too. She’s still a beginner, but one day she’d like to be able to go for rides to the store or around her neighbourhood for fresh air.
For Salamu, the community was the best part of the classes. Even as she waits anxiously for the classes to start again, she’s staying in touch with friends she made in the field.
“I was so happy…through that I found my friend that I’m still talking to now, on the phone, greeting each other, all that.”
At the end of the day, for Parry, the classes are about instilling hope — something she possesses in spades.
The future of the project is wide open; she crosses her fingers excitedly describing a major grant that could be on the way, bringing hundreds of new bikes into the shop.
“It could get really big and I want it to get really big,” Parry says with a smile. “I had the opportunity to prove to myself that I could do it, so now I think anything is possible.”
julia-simone.rutgers@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @jsrutgers