Blog Post

Happy National Bike to Work Day! Sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists, National Bike Month is a 31-day celebration of travel by two wheels. Communities big and small are hosting bike-centered events, teaching bike education classes, voting on resolutions to deem May Bike Month in their towns and much more. National Bike to Work Day, May 15 this year, is also a time to take stock of how much bicycling has grown locally and nationally. It’s trending upward: Since 2000, bike commuting has grown by 62% nationwide.

In partnership with Advocacy Advance, Investing in Place and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) were thrilled to engage over 30 community based organizations and leaders throughout Los Angeles County (list of organizations that attended at the bottom of the post) to discuss the pending expenditure plan as the region considers its fourth transportation sales tax for the ballot in November 2016. And of course we were tweeting! Check out LACBC’s storify post to see what we were saying during the workshop.

Rolf Prima built a one-of-a-kind VCX Disc wheelset for the North American Handmade Bicycle Show and, boy, did it get attention. The Eugene, Oregon, company had numerous offers to buy the bright turquoise wheelset on the spot, but they decided they could do more. We partnered with Rolf Prima to raffle off the wheelset, with all proceeds going to power bike advocacy!

This May, we’re asking the question, “With so many reasons to ride, what’s yours?” The beauty of the bicycle is that it means many things to many people, so we wanted to highlight some of those many reasons this National Bike Month. Today, we heard from Maria Bousted, of Chicago, and who is the founder of Po Campo. Her reason to ride?

In our Winter 2015 American Bicyclist magazine, we looked at the “Big Ideas” coming out of the bike movement. One such idea is RideScout, a new mobile application that is helping people get home quicker — without using their own car. Like any good startup, it all began on the back of a napkin. RideScout, a mobile app founded in Washington, D.C., aggregates users’ transportation options in any given city and provides the quickest route from point A to B. The app pulls information on the number of available rides at the nearest bikeshare station, the length of time you’ll have to wait for the next bus, and an estimate on just how congested the car traffic is outside your office.

On St. Patrick’s Day, residents of the city of Atlanta approved a $250 million bond package to fund transportation projects. The referendum came two and a half years after the defeat of an initiative known as T-SPLOST that would have implemented a one-cent sales tax for a huge array of transportation projects throughout the state. T-SPLOST was rejected by nine of the state’s 12 regions.

March is Women’s History Month, and what better way to celebrate than to learn more about the women who forged a path toward gender equity in bicycling?

In 2013, we published a series of stories on these important and inspiring women. Here we’ve aggregated all these great stories into one post for you to read, share and discuss! And if you haven’t already, register for the 2015 National Forum on Women & Bicycling and meet the present and future leaders of the women bike movement!

We’re so excited to once again feature women-owned and/or run businesses and entrepreneurs at our National Forum on Women & Bicycling pop-up shop. This year, Yvonne Bambrick will be selling her new book, The Urban Cycling Survival Guide, which was released on March 1! We caught up with Bambrick to discuss her own urban cycling story, her unique take on bicycling, and her thoughts on closing the gender gap in bicycling. If you haven’t registered for the Forum yet, click here and join us in Washington, D.C., next week!

When the League of American Bicyclists began the Women Bike program, our goal was to organize and elevate the conversation on how to get more women on bikes. Since its inception, we’ve granted more than $30,000 to community programs focused on women’s bicycling outreach and encouragement. We have convened four separate national events bringing together women leaders in the bike movement to share ideas and best practices and highlighted the best speakers in the country advocating for increased women’s participation in bicycling.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned in BikeWalkKC’s campaign to include complete streets treatments in plans for a new streetcar expansion. But no one can say it wasn’t a terrific success. Knowing that a proposed streetcar expansion wouldn’t be of much use if people couldn’t walk or bike safely to it, BikeWalkKC mobilized neighborhood advocates to lobby the city to include complete streets in the final streetcar expansion plan. They hoped to eventually secure up to $2 million for biking/walking infrastructure improvements along the streetcar route. They envisioned fully protected bike lanes connecting to the rest of the city’s bike network, racks, and bike-share stations. They wanted curb extensions, automatic pedestrian signals, and traffic calming.