Bicycle Friendly America
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 CiclovĂas 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 ciclovĂa 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.
Every time I go home to Orange County, California, I go through the same ritual familiar to many of us. People ask me about my work; I tell them about bikes; they respond with a story about how cyclists are a nuisance, and, while they themselves are too enlightened to menace those bike users, they see others doing it. Therefore, bicycling is a bad idea. I sigh mentally and acquiesce, not because I agree with them, but because I know where they’re coming from. I grew up knowing that driving as soon as I could would be best, because car culture reigns supreme.
Last week, we announced our 2014 Bicycle Friendly State Ranking and, to give you greater insight into the annual assessment, we’re breaking down each of the categories and identifying key trends. Education & Encouragement is a category in which many states excel. This can be seen in the strong growth in Signs of Success associated with the Education & Encouragement category.
On the first day of National Bike Month, the League has released its 2014 Bicycle Friendly StateSM ranking. For the seventh year in a row, Washington continues to lead the nation, but states like Utah, Minnesota and California moved up the ranking in 2014, shaking up the top 10. How does your state rank? Read more…
Year in and year out, it’s consistently the most popular and most requested issues of American Bicyclist: our annual spotlight on the Bicycle Friendly America program. And, the 2013 edition once again showcases the hundreds of communities, businesses and universities that are using the League’s blueprint to make biking better nationwide.