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"Those who don't see themselves may feel cycling is not for them": Images of cyclists lack diversity and focus on cycling as leisure rather than transport, researchers suggest

Analysis commissioned by climate charity suggests images of cyclists not representative, as group argues: "We simply cannot afford to exclude many people from choosing cycling as an alternative form of transport"...

Images of cyclists online lack diversity and may potentially contribute to "excluding many people from choosing cycling as an alternative form of transport", a charity has argued.

The analysis, commissioned by climate charity Possible and first reported by Forbes transport journalist Carlton Reid, saw the University of Westminster's Active Travel Academy in London look at 100 photos of "family cycling" from Google Images.

In general, it was found that images displayed "implicitly heterosexual-type nuclear families" and "there was a lack of diversity of representation in terms of disability, body size, and ethnicity", with the majority showing white, slim, non-disabled people riding in the countryside, away from urban areas.

Possible argues the lack of diversity could impact "those who don't see themselves" from thinking that cycling is for them, potentially "excluding many people from choosing cycling as an alternative form of transport".

"Those who don't see themselves in those images or who live in built-up areas may feel as if cycling is not for them because they are not also white, slim, or able-bodied and do not have widespread access to green spaces and calmer roads on which to cycle," Possible suggested.

The research concludes: "While inevitably limited (and only representing one facet of under-representation), the results are important and should raise concern about the narrowness of some of this representation. Specifically, there is a need for authorities and other organisations to widen the range of images that they use to show 'family cycling', which may well include generating and sharing their own images."

It was also suggested that Active Travel England "could take responsibility for sourcing and sharing a wider variety of such images, including those featuring people with larger bodies, different family structures, and more ethnic minority people cycling in locations that are clearly within the UK".

Last year, the Bicycle Association published the insights of its research into diversity in the cycling industry, releasing a report which said the senior leaders are "overwhelmingly white, heterosexual men", as well as noting "widespread experience of unfair treatment, including harassment".

> "The male, white, cycling enthusiast niche has reached its natural limit": Cycling must address lack of diversity, says Bicycle Association

That followed the Association, several months earlier urging the bike industry to change if it wants to grow and reach new customers.

The report found that women hold just eight per cent of cycle workshop roles, 19 per cent of customer-facing roles, and 40 per cent of the industry's administrative roles – though only a small handful of those have progressed to senior leadership positions.

Over 90 per cent of women face barriers to both entering and progressing within the sports industry, citing issues as discrimination, harassment, a lack of role models, difficulty finding a work-life balance, and a lack of training and targeted recruitment among the key "blockers" to progress.

Though no official data for the cycling industry exists at the moment, the report also noted that, anecdotally, Black, Asian, or people from ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the sector, as are individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds or with disabilities. There is also a lack of LGBTQ+ people joining or leading the UK bike industry, the report said.

Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.

Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.

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55 comments

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robike | 2 weeks ago
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I think it's been a problem for about a century and will remain a problem as long as race mentality dominates.  Even for cycling enthusiasts who go for hours long rides for fun, most of their journeys are practical commutes etc.  Big cycling firm marketing is lead by Tour races - which is, in turn, is lead by the anachronistic UCI rules. Perhaps they should be even more restrictive and insist every part of the race (including time trials) be done on the same bike (allowing copies as spares in case of accidents) - a real touring cyclist won't have different kit every day.

Electric assist bikes are leveraging a different view which will hopefully widen focus of "normal" bikes too.  

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Scarey | 3 weeks ago
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I suppose there may be some truth in this, however, one needs to remember that cyclists are generally practical people and unlikely to be unduly swayed by image issues. For those that are not predjudiced by 'the image'; the barriers against joining us are cost, their fitness, and whether the have ever or can rid a bike, to the uninitiated these are the mountains they have to climb before they decide. Maybe a broader spectrum image would help, who knows?

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mattw | 3 weeks ago
5 likes

Reading this story, it's worth noting:

1 - The TFL stats have been showing significant proportional increases in women / ethnic minorities cycling over several years. But still low absolute numbers.

2 - Wheels for Wellbeing have a free library of inclusive cycling images, published in 2023 and funded by Active Travel England.

This page, "Photobank of Disabled Cyclists":
https://wheelsforwellbeing.org.uk/

3 - While I'm at it, the WFW leadership team is, I think, all or nearly all female - which is great.

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Mybike | 3 weeks ago
2 likes

Maybe they should spend less time behind a screen and more time outside on a bike and there youll see many many different type of people riding bike in the real world.

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Mr Hoopdriver | 3 weeks ago
5 likes

No mention of the industry's marketing being focussed too heavily to the sports (esp. road racing) sector than utility sector skewing the figures.

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mdavidford | 3 weeks ago
5 likes

It seems like arguing over whether or not search engine results are diverse is missing a bigger issue here. Their prescription to address this is for "authorities and other [presumably cycling] organisations to widen the range of images that they use". Which rather ignores that the images used by those bodies is going to be a drop in the ocean, and likely make stuff all difference to those results.

[Incidentally, if you just search for 'family', the results are maybe marginally more racially diverse, but are still almost all slim, 'photogenic', and don't have physical differences, which rather suggests that this is not particularly a cycling-specific problem.]

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cyclisto | 3 weeks ago
5 likes

I think this is kind of BS talk.

In Netherlands almost everybody cycles. Make cycling infra really attractive, make cycle friendly legal framework for commuters, tax car use accordingly to the overall damages it creates and stop thinking about marketing stuff, a good product needs no marketing.

 

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hawkinspeter replied to cyclisto | 3 weeks ago
6 likes

cyclisto wrote:

I think this is kind of BS talk.

In Netherlands almost everybody cycles. Make cycling infra really attractive, make cycle friendly legal framework for commuters, tax car use accordingly to the overall damages it creates and stop thinking about marketing stuff, a good product needs no marketing.

I agree, but public perception does have a role to play too. We've had decades of poor portrayal of cyclists (used to be the butt of jokes in sitcoms) and that only seems to have stepped up more recently with outright attacks on cyclists, both physically and with hate-filled articles pushed by certain media outlets.

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S.E. | 3 weeks ago
1 like

Although in my area the proportion of "minorities" in the population is much larger than among cyclists, I see more and more of them riding bikes recently, one on top of a local climb last week, some commuters on city or e-bikes, a few food delivery boys, too...  in my street a (slightly colored) LGBT neighbor participates to competitions (and smoke joints at its window), everyone can see how Africans win TdF stages or cause crashes in the Tour du Pays Basque, etc.

Of course the priority of most migrants who come to Europe or America is NOT to ride a bike, they want a nice car and meat on the table... I have even been told that bikes are for little kids.

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LordSandwich | 3 weeks ago
1 like

How can a picture tell us much about whether or not the subject is cycling for leisure vs for transport? Is it the background? I would think the reason they use pretty, rural backgrounds would be that it's more appealing to look at, and easier to get a nice picture out of. Also, car ads do this too.

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hawkinspeter | 3 weeks ago
6 likes

There's another issue with the distribution (or not) of images of different demographics cycling that is more subtle and possibly worse than just not representing minorities. AI training sets will typically include large sets of internet images (they're free, so companies will use them) and this means that any bias will end up getting encoded in the weightings. As AIs get more and more hype, police forces are likely to get suckered in and start using them for such tasks as traffic policing and the inherent bias will then show up by the AIs discriminating against non-white/non-male cyclists and flagging them for stop and search and the like. This of course will then feed back into official figures and show that minorities on bikes are more likely to be involved in crime (because they've been targetted by the AIs) and so we end up creating a fictitious state of affairs by unthinking use of biased images.

And there's the issue of trained AIs being used to create "new" images which will likely be posted on the internet and further enforce the bias. AI will eat itself.

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HarrogateSpa replied to hawkinspeter | 3 weeks ago
1 like

Internet images aren't free. The owners have copyright in them unless they choose to make them available via, for example, Creative Commons licences.

Whether AI uses copyright images anyway, I don't know.

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hawkinspeter replied to HarrogateSpa | 3 weeks ago
1 like

HarrogateSpa wrote:

Internet images aren't free. The owners have copyright in them unless they choose to make them available via, for example, Creative Commons licences.

Whether AI uses copyright images anyway, I don't know.

Well, that's a whole bag of squirrels you're opening right there.

Copyright covers the right to make copies and distribution thereof, but by viewing a webpage, those images are being copied and distributed by the computers involved. However, that's where it gets complicated, as it could be argued that simply viewing the image could be counted under "fair use" and also that as the owner has made the image freely available to anyone on the internet, that it could count as entrapment if they then seek to prosecute anyone who does view that image.

When you throw AI into the mix, it gets even murkier as AI is very commonly trained on images that would be subject to copyright, and arguably, the results of AI images will contain aspects of all the copyrighted images used to train the AI. There's also the question of whether an AI image can be copyrighted i.e. does the person creating the image prompt then "own" the image or does it more properly belong to the original artists that created the images in the training sets?

(Personally, I think copyright has been appropriated by large corporations to enhance their power and profits and the length of time that works are now under copyright is just obscene. With our current long copyright terms and lack of archiving, we are going to lose so many works of art that won't be able to be released into the public domain when copyright lapses - that's a clear breach of the implied contract between the creator and the public interest. We now rely on piracy to provide copies of things such as early episodes of Doctor Who).

Also, there's an important distinction between "free" as in speech and "free" as in beer. Internet images are "free" as in beer.

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chrisonabike replied to hawkinspeter | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

O

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anke2 | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

There is another worrying message in these findings:

"Though no official data for the cycling industry exists at the moment, the report also noted that, anecdotally, Black, Asian, or people from ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the sector, as are individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds or with disabilities. There is also a lack of LGBTQ+ people joining or leading the UK bike industry, the report said."

I suspect that this is partially because members of minorities (that have often suffered from forms of hidden racism or abuse) are trying to blend in, avoiding things that are not mainstream (and may raise criticism from the bullies), trying to be "normal" - as a result of society putting pressure on them to "assimilate"... (This is only my impression, and I only have anecdotal evidence, but if this is true, then the even bigger concern should be about how members of the mentioned minorities are treated than about them cycling less!)

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polainm | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

This is another piece of research trying to find a reason for poor uptake in cycling in the UK which finds predominantly white male healthy (skinny if you're doing research from a driving seat) being heterosexual middle class and drinking only cappuccino with almond milk. 

It's nothing to do with psychotic drivers, police indifference, motornormativity, bias in CPS, judges and the motor insurance industry. Nor has it anything to do with a capped 0.001% of the transport budget for well-designed cycle infrastructure since 1890.

Given the quality of this 'research' I'd not brag about, instead actually talk to people who cycle instead of doing an AI farce.

 

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anke2 | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

I find the term "family cycling" biased, as it already implies a leisure activity. (Most parents work, kids attend school - so the only time for cycling together is, normally, leisure time.) - However, I can see why they did not search for "cyclist" instead - as this shows people on roadbikes. (Which again may seem fair enough, as these images will be more "symbolic" for a cyclist, more easy to recognize and more distinct than a "housewife locking up her bicycle at the super-market to do the shopping".

It's also worth noting that the level of diversity in the google results may well depend on ones own search history (but this is hard to test unless you compare to friends with a very different background - culture, place, language, ...)

Trying to assess how badly the images found by "family cycling" lack diversity compared to other search results, I searched for "driver". My results showed a "good level" of diversity - but there was another bias, which was quite shocking to me: All these drivers seem to smile - which certainly does not seem to reflect reality - being trapped in a box, in traffic, getting insufficient excercise or fresh air. (It's a bit like car-adverts that always show an impossibly empty road. They are more likely to show a bicycle than even one other car!)

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hawkinspeter replied to anke2 | 3 weeks ago
4 likes

anke2 wrote:

I find the term "family cycling" biased, as it already implies a leisure activity. (Most parents work, kids attend school - so the only time for cycling together is, normally, leisure time.) - However, I can see why they did not search for "cyclist" instead - as this shows people on roadbikes. (Which again may seem fair enough, as these images will be more "symbolic" for a cyclist, more easy to recognize and more distinct than a "housewife locking up her bicycle at the super-market to do the shopping".

It's also worth noting that the level of diversity in the google results may well depend on ones own search history (but this is hard to test unless you compare to friends with a very different background - culture, place, language, ...)

Trying to assess how badly the images found by "family cycling" lack diversity compared to other search results, I searched for "driver". My results showed a "good level" of diversity - but there was another bias, which was quite shocking to me: All these drivers seem to smile - which certainly does not seem to reflect reality - being trapped in a box, in traffic, getting insufficient excercise or fresh air. (It's a bit like car-adverts that always show an impossibly empty road. They are more likely to show a bicycle than even one other car!)

I tried a search of "commuter cyclists" on DuckDuckGo and that was worse than "family cycling" for diversity. The same search on Google scores much better on diversity.

I don't think that the image searches take into account your search history as otherwise I'd be getting a lot more squirrel images.

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quiff replied to hawkinspeter | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

 Up until now I've been amazed at your ability and persistence in finding apposite squirrel images. Have you resorted to AI creation yet?

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hawkinspeter replied to quiff | 3 weeks ago
5 likes

quiff wrote:

 Up until now I've been amazed at your ability and persistence in finding apposite squirrel images. Have you resorted to AI creation yet?

No, that feels a little bit like cheating. There's lots of AI squirrels already appearing in searches though

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mdavidford replied to hawkinspeter | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

hawkinspeter wrote:

quiff wrote:

 Up until now I've been amazed at your ability and persistence in finding apposite squirrel images. Have you resorted to AI creation yet?

No, that feels a little bit like cheating. There's lots of AI squirrels already appearing in searches though

I'm pretty sure your cycling squirrels are 'AI' produced. They certainly seem to have some unusual physical differences. Unless that was an intentional choice to reflect diversity.

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chrisonabike replied to mdavidford | 3 weeks ago
2 likes

It's just prejudice.  If people weren't ignoring the needs of squirrels for wheeled transport and there were more in the media about it I'm sure this would occur more frequently.

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hawkinspeter replied to mdavidford | 3 weeks ago
2 likes

mdavidford wrote:

I'm pretty sure your cycling squirrels are 'AI' produced. They certainly seem to have some unusual physical differences. Unless that was an intentional choice to reflect diversity.

I'm sure they are, but I didn't produce it, just found it on an image search. There's not that many great images of more than one squirrel cycling, so I went with that one.

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mattw replied to hawkinspeter | 3 weeks ago
4 likes

You need a drink.

Try a Pink Squirrel cocktail.
------------
To be used in commiseration when squirrels have nested in your loft, or in celebration when you see a red squirrel or you (or your cat) catch a grey one and turn it pink. In the latter case it is an excellent funeral toast.

1 oz creme de noyaux (or Amaretto)
1 tbsp white creme de cacao
1 tbsp light cream (or ice cream)

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and serve.
 

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eltonioni | 3 weeks ago
2 likes

Oh, the grifters have arrived. Don't let them in, keep the door locked shut. They get only paid to divide people and won't stop finding things to divide when their grift depends on it. It's just a bike so just ride it.

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Stephankernow replied to eltonioni | 3 weeks ago
0 likes
eltonioni wrote:

Oh, the grifters have arrived. Don't let them in, keep the door locked shut. They get only paid to divide people and won't stop finding things to divide when their grift depends on it. It's just a bike so just ride it.

Correct it's simply a bike for work or pleasure STOP TRYING TO DIVIDE US.

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slc replied to Stephankernow | 3 weeks ago
6 likes

1980s Grifters were pretty good bikes, though.

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chrisonabike | 3 weeks ago
2 likes

Not quite sure what the news is here?

  • The demographic mix of UK cyclists doesn't reflect UK society.  Reasons will be complex and may vary for different kinds of cyclists / cycling (e.g. I'd bet there's a positive skew away from "UK origin" in the ethnicity of folks working for the food delivery companies).  There may be less skew in "mass cycling" places e.g. NL rather than the UK.   That might give us a clue as to a good way to address things (not just changing pictures).  There although "locals" cycle more than "immigrants" the latter certainly cycle.  Oh, and uniquely more trips are made by women than men!
  • There is bias in images of cyclists - also not news.
  • There is bias in images of stuff in the world.  Really not news.

Do the images reflect the realities of who's cycling?  And if not why not?

Being a vanilla dude "I don't know what I don't know" but I can't help feeling there are a couple of more fundamental barriers to cycling... "being able to visualise it" is important, but question:

Just how much would changing the pictures (even if it was to reflect reality better - see the first question) really make a difference to numbers cycling in the UK?

People in the UK give all kinds of reasons why they don't cycle.  Skepticism needed - asking about things people previously haven't considered may get you speculation and confabulation... However the top reason given is likely close to the reality: all kinds of people just don't cycle because it's not "safe" (pleasant) or convenient.  Then: people don't cycle because very few others (of any gender, age or ethnicity) cycle.  Cycling for transport in particular is not perceived as a social activity (and in the UK this is partly by design).  Finally many people have a car, right there, so the question doesn't really arise for many...

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Sriracha replied to chrisonabike | 3 weeks ago
2 likes

Indeed, if they are looking to combat barriers to cycling I think there are far bigger ones than the images thrown up by Google. But I suspect they are grinding a different axe.

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FionaJJ replied to chrisonabike | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

chrisonabike wrote:

Just how much would changing the pictures (even if it was to reflect reality better - see the first question) really make a difference to numbers cycling in the UK.

I think there are two aspects to it. The obvious is the well established, and generally valid idea that a lot of people will rule out doing something if they think it's not for people like them. I'd say some similarities/differences are more important than others. The personal experiences of members here isn't that helpful as we are a self-selecting group.

If someone believes (possibly influenced by online images) that solo cyclists are mainly men who want to go fast, and mainly those who are already fit and reasonably slim that will create a barrier for women who haven't done sport in years. etc.

The other aspect is the indirect influence images have on decision-makers when it comes to providing facilities for cycling. I've not yet seen criticism of a new cycle path because it's not going to help gay people, but there is a common assertion that cycling is a white middle-class hobby, and  'what about disabled people' is particularly popular from those who would happily park in front of a dropped kerb, if not blocking the pavement.

Having images out there that include people using adapted bikes is particularly important. It will be harder to persuade the owners of websites designed to sell stuff to inclue more photos of scruffy people on old bikes, but local cycling campaign/support groups could and should make an effort to include more realistic images on their website and Facebook pages, and to support stories in the local press.

I'd argue that seeing other people cycling in day to day life is more important, but that's harder in areas where cycling rates are low, so images in the media, including online, become more relevant.

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