Councillor feels wrath of "Jordan Peterson and Tories across the land" by saying gritting routes “can be sexist” and “must change” to help cyclists and pedestrians

I disagree on principle that public spending should only be spent where it leads to an economic return. I think in any kind of civilised society, it is reasonable to spend public money on making life better and fairer for everyone.

The other argument is that by focusing on "traditional" commuting as the primary economic activity, you could in fact be creating barriers to further economic activity. There is plenty of information out there, but this EU article sums it up nicely: 

"women may turn down employment opportunities further away from home if the transport system does not enable them to travel to and from work in time to also meet their domestic family care obligations, or provide ample space and flexibility for women to travel with dependents and household goods."

So by focusing on traditional commutes, you may in fact be excluding some people, primarily women, from contributing to economic activity. 

I didn't say it should "only" be spent where it leads to economic return but when you have to prioritise resources you can create a vicious circle if your prioritisation away from economic activity leads to fewer resources being available which requires more prioritisation etc.

Your quote seems to be an argument for the prioritisation of major roads. Economic activity "further from home" is likely to rely on motorised transport of some kind which in turn will rely on the major roads.

Replace "further" with "harder to get to" then.

Do you mean these female friendly workplaces are not connected to the road network?

That's not what they are assuming; it's what the data shows -  a proportional difference, not an absolute binary. Women make more walking trips (i.e. on pavements) than men https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/walking-and-cycling-statistics-..., and 50% of all schoolchildren are walking or cycling to school. Data from Australia suggests that men are more likely to cycle on the road than women so all in, the unconscious bias in prioritising roads to grit not cycle paths and pavements is disproportionally affecting women and children (and the decision in itself will push more people into cars). In Cambridge with its 25% modal transport share being bikes, the economic argument doesn't hold as much water either (e.g. around 90% of high school children here are cycling to school so those cycle routes should be a key priority which is unfortunately usually ignored. It would be interesting to trial gritting the pavements and paths first and see if that got people either out of cars onto the streets or driving them with more care at lower speeds, which would in turn drive the economic need to grit first for the most vulnerable users.

and many stats prove that eating ice cream causes you to drown, whilst bees cant fly,  correlation is not causation, unless youre looking for some pet cause to prove, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.

there is nothing about gritting roads that has anything to do with gender bias unconcious or otherwise, its a completely spurious unnecessary distraction to make that link and imply its somehow due to some age old sexism with the way things are done, whilst using examples that are themselves inherently promoting the same sexist tropes they are complaining about by implying only women carry out child care duties, and must somehow be scared from driving on the roads if its left to all the men folk of the village..

we grit roads (priority routes only) because heres another stat for you 8.1% of all car accidents occur due to icy conditions on the roads, 1 in 10 drivers say theyve crashed on black ice and theres a 25% increase in crashes over winter months, all these crashes lead to KSIs, of both men and women because ice has no gender bias.

just flipping grit the roads and pavements because its the right thing to do, not because of some misconstrued attempt at applying 6th form level gender studies to it. we dont tend to do pavements because its impossible to cover all the pavements completely for all of the winter, and consider it sensible to just remind people to take more care.

and fwiw you dont grit pavements anyway, because thats actually a complete waste of time, the grit doesnt break down the ice down in the same way it does on roads by moving traffic driving over it on pavements, you have to spray it with a saline style solution instead.

Last paragraph - hear hear. Probably be needing this less in the future (but we don't know) however we have a lot to learn on how best to do this.

How they do this in a similarly snowy climate: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/clearing-the-streets-of-sn...

How they do this where there is a lot of snow: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

I think it is unfortunate to label it as sexist, as there is a hint of deliberateness in the term these days, but the article quite clearly demonstrates a factual basis in which one group of travellers are prioritiesd over another, and it so happens that there is a gender bias across those groups. The general non-argument seems to be that it is entirely predictable that pedestrians come to serious harm, but them's the breaks.

The sexism comes in because people may dismiss mums with or without pushchairs as economically unimportant making unimportant journeys; yet the article specifically points out an economic benefit of treating footpaths by reducing the injury costs, if that is to be the criteria. 

To comment on a couple of hints of ideas floating around in the comments, I would add that it is lazy to boil down decisions affecting quality of life down to whether there is an economic contribution. If the purpose of life was to give your life to the economy and then die, it might work, but most people aside from Jacob Rees-Mogg and a few of his fellow travellers would probably take issue. If you've lived with the long term effects of an injury, however trivially caused, you would value things like not slipping on a pavement quite highly.

Hear, hear!

Rich_cb wrote:

I don't think gritting roads falls into that category though. Roads are chosen to be gritted based on the economic needs of the area. If that happens to disproportionately benefit men that doesn't necessarily make it a bad policy. Gritting cycle paths will (in the UK at least) disproportionately benefit men too. That doesn't mean that's a bad policy either.

Are you saying, "It's OK that gritting policies predominantly benefit men, because what they do is more important"? because that's what it sounds like.

Maybe to you.

That tells us a lot about you but little else.

They did cover her death, but why let the facts get in the way of a good rant!

https://road.cc/content/news/cycling-live-blog-13-february-2023-299265

This is a relevant news story for me, but if it's not for you then maybe scroll on? A friend from my cycling group (female, baby of 10 months at the time) broke an ankle on an ungritted cycle path in Cambridgeshire last year and Papworth hospital lost a member of staff for a few months as a result, so the fact our highways leader is on it is of interest. It may not be news for you but that is a datapoint of one.

Eileen's passing is worthy of more than a brief piece of reportage in the daily blog though. A full well researched article in the next few days wouldn't go amis.

Fair enough.  I missed road.cc mentioning Sheridan in the live blog.  Personally I would think it worth more than a passing reference there.

I agree topics such as highway maintenance are of interest.

My "rant" is really to raise a viewpoint around the general click-bait style reporting that road.cc now does.  Which mainly involves scanning twitter for controversial cycling topics (helmets, high viz, near misses, road rage, etc) and promoting often fringe views from non experts.  Today we have Jordan Peterson.  These topics have been done to death.  Occasionally covering them is fine.  But look at the road.cc news and more than half of news stories are of this ilk.

As always I can (and have) voted with my wallet.  I have cancelled my subscription.

And now that the road.cc website bombards me with adverts (despite having 6 months left on my subscription) I won't be visiting the site again.  A shame as road.cc used to do really good cycling journalism and articles.  Now sadly mainly just click bait stuff a la Daily Mail.

This right in the middle of the rights culture wars against anything that goes against the status quo. Thank you to road.cc for reporting on this.

The Leamington Spa bike tracks is a good example of how they perceive a story.  The building of the tracks themselves I would see as a good, positive story for cycling but, please do correct us if I'm wrong, I can't find any previous articles relating to the planning and construction of the tracks on Road CC, no links to previous articles in the article itself, like you get in other stories on here. No, just the actually article about opposition from a few locals to get a reaction.