The Beryl Women’s Tour 2023 offers participants the chance to sign up for a variety of different sessions and events, including:

• Bike Happy events - a two-hour skills and confidence session for women on bikes 
• Group rides - an hour-long group bike ride session for women
• Scoot Happy events - a two-hour skills and confidence session for women on e-scooters

Following the success of Beryl’s Scoot Happy Tour, which began in April 2022, the Beryl Women’s Tour events are designed to improve knowledge and ability in a relaxed and fun environment. 

Led by trained Bikeability instructors, events are accessible for all women regardless of age, ability or experience and can be easily booked onto using Eventbrite. 

To mark the launch of the tour, Beryl has comissioned a specially designed bike and e-scooter that take inspiration from multi record-breaking cycling legend Beryl Burton OBE. The shapes on the vehicles are a nod to her famous achievements, with the straight lines illustrating her remarkable speeds and the ovals representing the tracks where many of her records were set. 

The Beryl 2022 Annual Rider Report , which gained feedback from thousands of riders across all Beryl schemes, showed that under a third of Beryl riders are women. The report also showed women are significantly (25%) less confident than men when riding on the road. 

Beryl Head of Marketing and Communications, Claire Sharpe, said: “Our mission is to remove the barriers that exist to cycling in cities and inspire more people to take up sustainable travel options.

“Our data, as well as national data, shows that we need to do even more to empower women to feel safe and confident while using sustainable transport, which is why we have created the Women’s Tour. 

“By creating a pressure-free environment where women can come along, learn new skills, build confidence and access help and advice, we can start to redress the gender imbalance we are currently seeing.

“Getting more women out of their cars and onto sustainable transport will help further reduce road congestion, while contributing towards improving air quality and public health.”

Bournemouth resident Joanne Hollington regularly uses both Beryl bikes and e-scooters, mainly for leisure purposes but also to access the train station from her home. 

Last June, she took part in a Beryl Scoot Happy skills event and was very positive about the experience, describing it as highly valuable. Joanne is supportive of the idea of women’s only events and believes that encouraging female riders could have an inspirational effect. 

“I definitely think that women-only group rides and cycle confidence sessions are a good idea. It certainly seems a male-dominated form of getting around and I think that encouraging women in this regard is a big step forward.

“The more women seen out and about on Beryl transport, the more it will encourage those considering Beryl to possibly take the next step and sign up.”

The government's National Travel Survey 2021* showed that women made fewer cycling trips on average than men in all age groups, with 7 cycling trips per person in 2021, compared to 24 trips per person. It also showed that men travelled four times the distance that women do, with an average of 89 miles cycled compared to an average of 22 miles.

Beryl’s Annual Rider Report also revealed that, on average, its users are 30% female, 67% male and 3% transgender, non-binary or other. This is slightly more imbalanced than the national average for bike share, which shows users are, on average, 36% female, 60% male and 3% transgender, non-binary or other, according to the CoMoUK 2021 Annual Bikeshare Report. 

*2022 data to be released in July 2023