The National Women’s Cycling Summit: This Is Not a Bike

Leah Missbach Day, co-founder of World Bicycle Relief and the keynote speaker to inaugurate the Women’s Bicycling Summit, was very succinct with her main point about a bike:

“This is not a bike.”

The bike is a tool, she intoned; a tool that helps generate economic stability, community cohesiveness, and gender equality, particularly in poor and marginalized parts of the world.

“The bicycle movement is just getting started,” stated Carolyn Szczepanski, communications director of the League of American Bicyclists, in her introductory remarks. She said many in marginalized communities, particularly ethnic minorities, are feeling left out of the bicycle movement. “Instead of feeling left out, [Anthony Taylor co-founder of the National Brotherhood of Cycling] tells them something really empowering: ‘You’re not too late — you’re just in time.’ I would submit to you we are just in time. In 2009, women accounted for just 24 percent of bike trips in the United States and, obviously, it is time for that to change. Without engaging, empowering, and elevating 50 percent of the population — women — we simply cannot succeed as a movement.”