Background Cycling is beneficial for health and for the environment but the overall and differential impacts of large-scale investment to support cycling are not well understood. Cycling Demonstration Towns and Cycling Cities and Towns were schemes that collectively awarded additional funding to 18 urban areas in England between 2005 and 2011 for a variety of cycling schemes, e.g., cycle lanes and cycle training. This study aimed to use within-person longitudinal measures of commute mode to examine the equity impacts of these town-wide initiatives on cycle commuting.

Methods The Office for National Statistics-Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS) contains census data for a 1% representative sample of the population of England and Wales, selected based on 4 dates of birth (4 of 365). We used longitudinally linked 2001 and 2011 census data from 25,747 individuals who lived in an intervention or selected comparison area, were employed, and reported a usual commute mode at both time points. Logistic regression was used to assess the impacts of funding on cycle commuting as the interaction between the estimates for time (2001/2011) and intervention (intervention/comparison) in an individual-level difference-in-difference analysis, adjusting for a range of individual and household characteristics. Differential impacts were examined by age, gender, education and area-level deprivation, and uptake and maintenance of cycling were examined separately. All analyses were conducted using Stata 16.

Results Difference-in-difference analyses showed no intervention impact on cycle commuting prevalence in the whole sample (AOR=1.08; 95% CI 0.92, 1.26) or among men (AOR=0.91; 95% CI 0.76, 1.10) but found an intervention effect among women (AOR=1.56; 95% CI 1.16, 2.10). The intervention promoted uptake of cycle commuting in women (AOR=2.13; 95% CI 1.56, 2.91) but not men (AOR=1.19; 95% CI 0.93, 1.51). Differences in intervention effects by age, education and area-level deprivation were less consistent and more modest in magnitude.

Conclusion Living in an intervention area, compared with a comparison area, was associated with an increase in cycling during the intervention period among women but not men. These differences are potentially important due to extant lower cycling in women than men in England and elsewhere, in addition to lower physical activity more generally. Funding for cycling promotion might provide support for greater gender equality in cycling prevalence, while potential differences between men and women should be considered in the design and evaluation of future interventions to promote cycling.