our first birthday and last blog post

6 minute read

From maintenance classes to threats of legal action, it’s been a jam packed first year of Spoke Out!

We’ve done a lot with very little, and plenty of backlash. However, rather than start with the negatives, we’d like to share our highlights of the past 12 months –

• We marked the first anniversary of the tragic death of 25 year old Josephine Gilbert through our ‘see us’ campaign and film which had 1,500 views.
• For International Women’s Day our film highlighting sexism in cycling had 1,000 views and 14 local cycling organisations pledged to tackle gender inequality as part of our ‘choose to challenge‘ campaign.
• With support from London Cycling Campaign, we set up a Cycle Buddy scheme to match those new or returning to cycling with more confident riders to build up knowledge and experience of riding on the roads.
• We designed and ran free cycling courses in the summer for girls in partnership with a local mosque.
• We partnered with Derby Bike PopUp and Cycling UK to deliver 5 free Dr.Bikes and 3 cycle maintenance workshops for women & non-binary people across the city last summer.
• We delivered 2 free cycling courses for women & non-binary people to build up confidence and skills.
• 40 riders of all ages and abilities joined our first Kidical Mass ride as part of our ‘make space for us‘ campaign with 5,000+ views of the film we made from as far away as India and New Zealand!
• We secured funding from our fiscal host’s Pitch Perfect event, Bikeability’s Widening Participation Fund and the Foundation for Integrated Transport.
• We’ve had over 7,000 views of our website and we’ve got nearly 1,000 followers across our social media platforms.

On a personal note I was honoured to feature as one of Cycling UK’s 100 Women in Cycling 2021, and I also became a qualified Bikeability instructor, as well as finally learning how to fix a puncture!

In the past couple of months, I’ve taken some time to reflect on the future of Spoke Out. I’ve been running this almost entirely voluntarily since I had the idea back in the autumn of 2020. While it has been hugely rewarding, it has also been far more challenging than I could have ever anticipated because of my energy limiting disabilities and other work commitments I’ve had to take on to stay afloat, but mostly because of the harsh reality of the cycling sector.

As one of many examples, in a couple of weeks it will also be the first birthday of a partnership meeting I attended in a then work capacity where a male Sustrans’ staff member made an openly sexist comment, in addition to other unacceptable behaviour. My choice to call this out resulted in making the devastating decision to give up my job, and then being threatened with legal action by Sustrans for not keeping quiet about what happened.

Next week, it will be also two years since 25 year old Josephine Gilbert was killed while cycling by an unlicensed lorry driver on the 21st January 2020. I will never forget the phone calls I had with the police, and her family in the days after her death. I didn’t know Josephine but her passing has profoundly affected me. Maybe it is because we are close in age, or it is all those near misses that happen every single time I cycle that make me think of how close we all are to being killed by drivers because of how unsafe our roads are. Just last month I attended a meeting with Derby City Council to discuss proposed cycle infrastructure plans as part of the multi million pound Transforming Cities project. When I asked, the gentleman responsible for the plans admitted they were not safe for all cyclists. Josephine’s death was the reason I set up Spoke Out as I know sadly there will be more fatalities. It is the reason it is our first birthday today as the first anniversary of her tragic passing was the foundation of our first campaign.

Time passes, and despite all our efforts outlined at the start of this post, it is hard to ignore that it still feels like a losing, and lonely, battle.

If we want grassroots groups like Spoke Out to be able to make the difference we so desperately want to, we urgently need radical change in our cycling sector. We need support, not just locally but at a national level. We need to break down the unfair monopoly on millions of pounds of government and local authority funding sources that could transform and enable what we do. We need the many men in positions of power within the sector to understand and acknowledge their privilege and stop defending and tolerating discrimination. We need those designing our infrastructure to understand and listen to our needs. We need a genuine belief in equality, diversity and inclusion rather than a tickbox façade. We need to prioritise enabling active travel for everyone.

There is a growing community of inclusive cycling groups, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, ready and willing to do the above but most of the work we do is unpaid and at great cost to our wellbeing, often by people who are already on low incomes and who struggle more. It is time to share the resources, value our time and skills and be open to change so we can all thrive, rather than barely survive.

I am determined to keep Spoke Out going in some form, but sadly there will have to be some changes in order to do so, the first of which is no longer maintaining a blog for the time being.

I will definitely miss writing these posts, but it is probably for the best from a capacity, and more importantly a legal, perspective.

Based on a recent subject access request I made to Sustrans for my personal data from their internal emails and investigation reports, I know that Spoke Out’s content, and also my personal social media channels and text messages, are disconcertingly popular and well monitored, especially this blog. Despite only really having student loan debt and a PSP to my name, I’m keen to not be threatened with legal action again.

So although I think it’s a bit creepy, thank you to Sustrans for funding staff and lawyer’s time to bump up our blog, website and social media views over the past year! I hope amidst the irreparable damage you caused us and upholding the patriarchy, that you at least enjoyed sifting through my personal posts about cats and sea otters.

It’s time to move on, and I would like to conclude with a much more sincere thank you to those who read these posts for the past year for the right reasons, and who took the time to share the positive impact they had. Your encouragement really helped to make up for the men who read them and then contacted me online, via my personal phone number or even set up fake social media profiles to voice their, at times very upsetting, thoughts and strongly worded demands.

Similarly, thank you to our wonderful guest contributors James and Kate for sharing their insightful thoughts on cycling with kids. I’d highly recommend giving their posts a read.

The most significant thank you goes to all those who have supported Spoke Out since we started. I’m well aware that Spoke Out is just a teeny tiny project with big dreams in a small city with water fountains but no water. However, whether you’ve been part of our volunteer steering group and put up with my increasingly random meeting ice breakers and campaign ideas, or you’ve kindly shared a social media post, attended a free workshop or been a Cycle Buddy, your belief in our vision has meant more than I can describe in words.

Our birthday wish is, and will always be, to support, encourage and empower more girls, women and non-binary people to cycle (and of course to eat cake).

Thank you,

Lucy