Bicycle Friendly America
At first glance, Ellen Dunham-Jones doesn’t seem to fit the part. A car-free architect. An urban designer with a focus on sustainability. A creative thinker with a passion for problem solving. Even her colleagues, she admits with a laugh, have asked her incredulously: “What are you doing out in the ‘burbs?!” Dunham-Jones is one of the nation’s leading experts on “Retrofitting Suburbia” — in fact, she wrote the book on the topic. But she thinks outside the (big) box (stores).
We are currently seeking a spring intern to assist with the Bicycle Friendly America program. Each year, through its Bicycle Friendly America program, the League evaluates hundreds of applications from across the country, and designates Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum-level Bicycle Friendly States, Communities, Businesses, and Universities. Learn more about the Bicycle Friendly America program at bikeleague.org/bfa.
It’s official: The League reached 100 visits to communities across the country this year, helping them to create more bicycle friendly places for their residents. I completed 77 of those visits myself, so, as you can image, I have a lot of lessons to share. Here’s some of what I learned.
The City of Milwaukee once again was awarded a Bronze Bicycle Friendly Community award status by the League of American Bicyclists. We know the bar is continually being raised on what it means to be bicycle-friendly. To meet those challenges, City of Milwauke Mayor Tom Barrett has directed Milwaukee’s Department of Public Works Commissioner Ghassan Korban and City Engineer Jeff Polenske to establish a sub-committee of the City’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Task Force to define the path to not only reaching Silver but going for Gold-level status. The City is already making progress on many of the League’s recommended “Steps to Silver.”
We released our latest round of Bicycle Friendly Business awardees — this biggest round ever for the program — this week. Over the next week, we’re highlighting some of the best stories we heard from the new and renewing honorees. For Phelps, a marketing and communications firm in Santa Monica, Calif., biking to work starts with biking to lunch. This post comes to us from Wesley High, an IT specialist with Phelps, which is a new Silver-level Bicycle Friendly Business.
(Part of our ongoing Building Blocks of a Bicycle Friendly Community series.) I’m going to come right out and say it: Cities that have bicycle program managers or bike coordinators are far more bicycle friendly than those that do not -– even when the same amount of resources are being devoted to improving conditions for bicycling.
The most bicycle friendly places are those that adopt city ordinances to help improve or promote bicycling. One easily visible example is a bicycle parking ordinance like the one in Santa Monica, Calif., which not only ensures an adequate supply of racks at destinations, but also requires event organizers to have monitored bicycle parking for 200 – 250 bikes if attendance is expected to reach 1,000 or more (requiring 3 attendants).
In all my travels, I’ve seen a lot of great things on the street, from green lanes to bike boxes. But those high-profile facilities are the result of something far less visible: words. For a truly Bicycle Friendly Community, before you can put paint to pavement, you need the laws and policies that legitimize and encourage safe cycling.
Can a temporary street closure have lasting effects on everyday transportation habits? The social psychology concept of “unfreezing” habit suggests that it can, as detailed in a new report on “How Ciclovías Can Unfreeze Streets.” This report is based on fieldwork I undertook as an anthropologist studying bicycle advocacy and street culture in Los Angeles from 2008 to 2011. My central project was helping to organize the open street event CicLAvia. I found the ciclovía to be useful for identifying the “human infrastructure” that helps or hinders our work as active transportation change agents.
Yesterday, I talked about the “WOW” of Bicycle Friendly Communities. Perhaps the most important part of that “WOW” factor, is the “win-over projects.” I call them “win-over projects” because they tend to cause people to turn their heads (maybe even scratch their heads) and get them thinking that maybe bicycling could start working for them. The communities that are really seeing growth in bicycling have done something big and beautiful that people can’t help but notice. I’ve pulled together some of the best “win-over projects” I saw during my trips to Memphis and mutli-city tour of California.