Blog
Last week, we announced our latest round of Bicycle Friendly Communities, bringing the program to 303 BFCs in 48 states. Las Vegas, NV, is one of 18 new BFCs, receiving the Bronze-level award. We were struck by Las Vegas’s growth and blooming bike culture. Kristina Swallow, a program manager for the city’s Department of Public Works, wrote this story about Las Vegas’s rise as a Bicycle Friendly Community.
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Santa Barbara is a small town in Southern California whose size, flat terrain, and sunny weather make it a fertile environment for bicycle cultures of all kinds. From Gibraltar Road to the Cabrillo Beach bike path, you can find many groups using two-wheeled locomotion for multiple reasons. Roadies on carbon-fiber bikes ride with their teams, mountain bikers traverse our challenging trails, BMXers practice tricks, and tourists see the sights on rented bikes.
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Melody is originally from North-East Tennessee. She moved to Jackson, Mississippi fifteen years years ago and immediately got involved with community development and service oriented work focused on low income communities in the inner city of Mississippi’s capital. Melody now serves in a statewide role as the executive director of Bike Walk Mississippi, the state’s bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organization.
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A terrible string of fatal bike crashes in the Tampa area in late 2011 and early 2012 left the local bike community reeling. As they shared each awful tragedy with us, we too felt frustrated and powerless. We also realized how little we really knew about the circumstances of serious crashes between bikes and cars, and how woefully inadequate (and late) the available data was at the national level.
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As a person of color, I acknowledge the complexities that people who are marginalized experience because I too live with these experiences every day. I see the cultural diversity that exists within the bicycle movement and comprehend that all groups have different needs when it comes to education and empowerment. We must work together to see that we keep all diverse groups into consideration, so we can all continue moving forward in taking ownership of these safe, healthy, clean and bicycle-oriented linkages.
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The WTS (Women’s Transportation Seminar) annual conference brings together hundreds of women transportation professionals to network and share ideas. WTS has chapters all over the country and some abroad, and they place a big emphasis on early career mentorship.
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Two years ago, Arkansas came dead last in the Bicycle Friendly State (BFS) ranking. There was no state advocacy group and Arkansas is one of two states where the state highway agency doesn’t even pretend it is anything other than that (Nebraska Dept. of Roads, meet the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Dept.); frankly, we wondered if anyone would care about the last place score. Or notice.
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It’s one of our favorite days of the year: National Bike To Work Day! Earlier this week, we looked a bit more deeply at the data surrounding bike commuting with the U.S. Census Bureau, which just last week released a new report on the subject. Bottom line: Bike commuting has grown 61% over the past decade. And, today, we’re so excited to see all the faces behind that number.
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We all have reasons why we ride. Some of us ride for transportation. Others ride for health. Many ride for multiple reasons. But here at the National Bike Challenge, there’s a bonus reason why we ride… Prizes.
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The Bicycle Friendly States ranking is now in its 7th year. Launched in 2008, it has undergone several iterations as we continue to strive to capture what makes a state bicycle friendly. The last major revision to our process was in 2012, when the survey for our Bicycle Friendly State ranking was merged with the survey used for the Alliance for Biking and Walking’s Benchmarking Report. Due to this major revision, this blog only looks at data from the past two years.
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