Mostly white men---not women---ride bikes on Valencia, in SF, and the Bay Area

Far more men bike Valencia than women (at 3:09)

The hed on Phil Matier's column in the hard copy of the Chronicle ("S.F. bike lanes filled by wealthy white men") was more succinct and reality-based than the cutesy online version ("What’s white, male and 5 feet wide? Bay Area’s bike lanes"):

When it comes to exclusivity, one would be hard-pressed to beat San Francisco’s bike lanes, where most regular riders are male, affluent, white “bike bros,” with 1 in 4 making $250,000 or more a year, according to the most recent U.S. census data.

And it’s not just in San Francisco.

“Bicycle commuting is mostly the province of wealthier white men all across the Bay Area,” Metropolitan Transportation Commission spokesman John Goodwin said.

Just look at the numbers.

Male bike commuters outnumber female bike commuters by at least a 2-to-1 ratio in all nine Bay Area counties, according to the 2014-2018 American Community Survey taken by the U.S. Census Bureau...

And they tend to be white.

Across the Bay Area, white riders represented 61% of the bike commuters, followed by Hispanics at 17%, Asians at 15% and African Americans at 2.4%.

In San Francisco, the white percentage was even higher — 65% of regular riders — followed by Asians and Hispanics at 14% each and African Americans at just over 1% of regular San Francisco bike commuters. How do those numbers compare to the city’s population as a whole? Whites: 40%; Asian: 34%; Hispanic: 15%; African American: 5%.

As for age, about 7 out of 10 bike commuters in San Francisco are between 20 and 40 years old, a trend replicated in other Bay Area counties, except for Marin, Napa, Solano and Sonoma, where the lion’s share of bike commuters are in their 50s...

“Given the state of San Francisco’s streets, the demographic numbers are about what I would expect,” newly installed San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency General Manager Jeffrey Tumlin said. “The ethnic and income breakdown from the census survey is fairly consistent with the demographics of the neighborhoods served by our current network.”

In other words, the city’s bike lanes tend to be in more affluent areas, easily accessible to downtown...

Rob's comment:
This is not news to readers of this blog: See Women and bikes and this and this.

The SF Bicycle Coalition has long struggled to get more women on bikes.

The "numbers" show that cycling here in Progressive Land is actually declining even as the city's anti-car, pro-bike zombie policies shamble on.

The new head of the SFMTA, bike guy Jeffrey Tumlin, gets a sound bite:

“For many neighborhoods, a protected bikeway to downtown is not their highest priority — getting kids safely to school may be more important,” Tumlin said...

Yes, but getting kids on bikes, to school or anywhere else, actually makes them more unsafe (see also Children, bikes, and traumatic brain injury and Cycling and "numb nuts").