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.