Help Transform Your Community: Take the Bicycle Friendly Community Survey!

Imagine a world where everyone can ride their bicycle safely and enjoyably. A place where activity-friendly routes are abundant, well-maintained, and connected within an accessible network that takes you wherever you want to go. A nation where everyone, whether they bike or not, recognizes and enjoys the many benefits and opportunities of bicycling — and where everyone can experience the joy of bicycling. Sounds like a dream, right? 

At the League, we’re on a mission to turn this vision into reality. Our latest initiative involves conducting a comprehensive census of experiences and perceptions of bike riding across the United States through our updated Bicycle Friendly Community (BFC) survey. In past years, this survey’s primary aim has been to gather local feedback to inform the League’s recommendations for specific applicant communities. This year, we’re thinking bigger. Whether or not your community has applied for the BFC program, we want to know: what is it like to ride a bike where you live, and how can your community do better? 

Take the Survey!

Your input makes a significant difference. When you share your personal biking experiences and feedback about your community, it helps us understand what barriers keep people like you from riding more safely or more often. Your insights can also help us understand the unique challenges and opportunities specific to your area — for example, calling out that one particularly dangerous intersection that keeps you from riding to work — leading to tangible recommendations for improvements that benefit everyone in your community. 

So, what’s in this survey? We’ll be asking about your personal bike riding habits, your opinions on how safe your community is to ride in, and more. If your community has applied for a Bicycle Friendly Community award, there will be specific questions tailored to gather detailed feedback. The survey takes just 10-15 minutes to complete, and nearly every question is optional, so you can provide as much or as little information as you’re comfortable with.

We understand the importance of privacy, and we want to assure you that your responses will only be shared anonymously. The data collected will be used to create a BFC Feedback Report for the applicant community, helping them understand residents’ perspectives, identify and reduce barriers to biking, and set goals to improve local bikeability. Even if you’re providing feedback for a community that didn’t apply to the BFC program this year, your insights still have value. It will help us establish a comprehensive national baseline by which to compare all communities, and to help us build a national census of Americans’ perceptions of safety and comfort when it comes to bike riding — plus, once feedback for your community reaches a critical mass,  we can share the findings and encourage them to work towards a Bicycle Friendly Community award.

To participate, simply click on this survey link and follow the easy step-by-step instructions. As with any survey, more feedback helps produce more powerful insights so we encourage you to use this toolkit to share the BFC survey with your community. You can even fill it out more than once for different communities, if you have feedback that varies between the different places you live, work, visit, and ride in. 

Your participation is vital in helping us create a Bicycle Friendly America. We believe when more people ride bikes, life gets better for everyone. Thank you in advance for your time and input — together, we can build a future where bicycling is safe, enjoyable, and accessible for all.