Ensuring a Voice For Youth: The Tube NYC

In 2013, the League released “Engaging Youth In Bicycle Advocacy”, a case study on why youth bike and youth involvement in bicycle advocacy. A lot of the obstacles to youth engagement noted in the study, like a lack of bike accessibility and a disconnect between adults and youth when it comes to leadership, are still prevalent today. Many organizations, including the League itself, can better educate themselves on how to not only get more youth involved in biking but make sure young bicyclists feel recognized as an integral part of the bicycling movement. 

As part of that work to listen, learn, and collaborate, we endeavored to hear from organizations made for youth and/or guided by youth to best answer the question of how to do this. In a continuing series, we’ll learn more about these groups and their answers. In today’s blog, meet The Tube NYC.

The Tube NYC

The Tube NYC is a bike activism group founded by NYC high schoolers, for NYC high schoolers and the entire bike community. We advocate for safer and more equitable bike infrastructure all across the city in an effort to make NYC a greener, more accessible city. 

As city kids who grew up biking around our neighborhoods and to school, we’ve seen firsthand the consequences of insufficient bike infrastructure. After learning about Laurie Garrett’s innovative Tube proposal, we decided to take action to ensure that we, the next generation, have a bike-able NYC for us and our kids. 

The Tube NYC organized a rally at Brooklyn Boro Hall on October 23rd in support of Laurie’s proposal to repurpose currently underused structures to create an interborough bike highway. 

What would you like to see other groups, especially national organizations, doing to involve more youth in cycling?

Outreach. We at The Tube believe that, as the conversation around cycling safety continues across the globe, the youth need to be a prominent part of it. We’d like to see established cycling groups focusing more on outreach to the next generation, getting kids interested in cycling and cycling activism, and giving them resources to further their interests. 

Some advice to these groups would be to enlist actual kids to do this outreach, as we would relate to them more and kids can easily recognize an adult voice (no matter how “hip” they sound or write).

To learn more about The Tube NYC, visit www.thetubenyc.com. 

If you’re a youth group or cycling organization interested in sharing your tips for involving more youth in cycling, reach out to us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you!