Cycle to Work Day, held annually in the UK each summer, aims to encourage people to consider an active alternative to the way they travel to and from work.
Leading the Way Active Travel Officer, Dianne Whyte (centre front) with a Women Into Cycling group including Madhuri Rao pictured during a led ride in the Titanic Quarter, Belfast. Credit: Sustrans
Madhuri Rao, an NHS worker living in Northern Ireland, now commutes with confidence after completing a Women Into Cycling programme with our Leading the Way workplace team in Belfast.
Here, she explains how support from our Active Travel Officer, Dianne Whyte, who cycled her through her cross-city route to show her how to safely navigate rush-hour traffic, emboldened her to swap the bus for her bike.
'Amazing experience'
“The whole experience was absolutely amazing. I’m not new to cycling, I have been doing it for as long as I can remember.
"But once I moved to Belfast, I noticed that the traffic was a bit intimidating, not very cyclist-friendly, which made me hesitant. Then I heard about the Sustrans course through my work in the Belfast Health & Social Care Trust.
“It doesn’t matter how much experience you have cycling, you learn about all these little things you don’t necessarily think of before you even get on, like a proper bike check or bike maintenance.
'Enlightening to learn bike maintenance'
"I have been cycling all along but never thought much about how to care for my bike. If it broke down, I brought it to a repair shop.
"But on the programme, I learned to do so many things for myself, it was so enlightening!
“I got to meet some nice people, have good fun and learn about new routes.
“The cherry on the top for me was when Dianne cycled to work with me, she showed me the routes which I thought was amazing. Otherwise I would not have had the confidence to take my work route. I appreciated that a lot, I’m really grateful.
“It’s a journey of about 3.5 / 4 miles, parts on road with traffic and I would be nervous about how cars behave around bikes, I didn’t feel like doing it on my own.
"Dianne met me in the morning and I saw how she did it, taking the lane and that gave me confidence. She also travelled back with me from work that day so I knew the route in both directions.
'Seeing other cyclists gives me confidence'
"I’ve now started to notice other cyclists and seeing them too out in the traffic gives me confidence so I try to cycle to work about two or three times a week.
“The journey takes me about 40 minutes each way, I don’t go fast but it’s still much quicker than before when I had to take two buses each way which took around an hour and a quarter.
“I arrive at work energised and I feel the same way when I get home in the evenings. Before, it was a real struggle to make time for exercise with my commute and work taking up most of my day. Now I get two 40-minute sessions as part of my day which is a big, big plus.
Wish for cycle-friendly traffic
“I plan to keep cycling to work in the brighter months now. If it’s really windy, I wouldn’t have the confidence to cycle along the busy A55 which is part of my route.
"There’s a lot of overgrowth which makes the shared path very narrow and with vehicles passing at 50 miles per hour, I wouldn’t feel safe in windy conditions.
“The infrastructure in Belfast is getting better by the day but if I had a wish, it would be for the traffic to be a bit more friendly to cyclists and for the cycle paths to be better maintained.”
Discover more about our work in Northern Ireland.
Find out more about the Leading the Way programme for workplaces.
The Leading the Way with Workplace Active Travel project is funded by the Public Health Agency.
It aims to encourage and enable staff in some of Belfast’s and the North West's largest workplaces* to adopt active and sustainable travel habits.
*Belfast Trust, Department for Infrastructure, Public Health Agency, Belfast City Council, Ulster University, Western Trust and Derry City & Strabane District Council.
