Month: June 2011

Today, the 60,000th participant of our Cycle Challenge programmes registered on our webtool! What a milestone!

Here’s a shot of our website with the stats as they stand at this moment, but by the time you read this, they’ve probably gone up even more! Check out our website homepage for the latest stats – partners.lovetoride.net

This has been achieved by the CTC Challenge for Change team working alongside our partners from local authorities and public health, as well as by our Cycle Champions from the 2,500 participating businesses we’ve worked with from around the world.  Pat yourselves on the back everyone!

To date we’ve surveyed over 36,000 people in the UK about their cycling, health and travel behaviour as part of our Workplace Cycle Challenge programme. This includes more than 13,000 ‘non-cyclist’ participants.

We now have some great results and interesting findings from this research. For example, we know that:

• Behaviour change programmes work – 1 in 3 non-cyclist participants (37%) continue to cycle once a week or more after they take part in a Workplace Cycle Challenge.

• Hills are not a barrier for many non-cyclists – Non-cyclists in hilly areas are almost just as likely to continue to cycle once a week or more than non-cyclists in flat areas (31% vs 37% of non-cyclists continue cycling regularly each week in hilly and flat areas respectively).

• Behaviour change programmes work even in ‘cycle unfriendly’ areas – Non-cyclists who live in areas that can be classed as ‘neither cycle friendly nor unfriendly’ are just as likely to continue cycling as non-cyclists in areas that are ‘cycle friendly’ (40% and 41% respectively). Where as in ‘cycle unfriendly’ areas it is 27% of non-cyclists who continue to cycle each week, which while is clearly less than 40% is still a good result for a project.

 

What would you like to find out?

If we had the key to open up the heads of people in your area and ask them any questions you liked about cycling, what would you ask?

We’re currently re-designing our surveys for our future Challenges, and we would like to get the thoughts and ideas of people who are working to get more people cycling in the UK.

We’re looking for new questions that we can ask each of our three key audiences:

• Non-cyclists – people who don’t currently cycle

• Occasional Cyclists – people who cycle 1-4 times a month

• Regular Cyclists – people who cycle on 2+ days a week.

 

Sharing Knowledge with the cycling community

We’re keen to share the results of our research with people like yourself who are working to design and implement programmes that will encourage more people to cycle, more often and for transport trips.

It’s our aim to give you the intelligence to make your job easier and your projects more effective.

 

Send in your questions

Please do take minute to think up some questions that you would like to ask each of the above audiences. You can send your thoughts, ideas and questions to:

work-with-us@lovetoride.org

If you send in an idea by 31 August 2011 then we’ll put you in the draw to win a bottle of New Zealand wine!

Please feel free to get in touch:

Thomas Stokell

+44 (0)7984 309 265

thomas@lovetoride.org

Thanks for your thoughts and insights.

2010 was a great year and 2011 is off to a good start as well.  Last year we ran 18 Challenges and so far this year we’ve run 12.

To date the latest participation figures are:

• 59,000 have people have participated in a Challenge programme from
• 2,500 organisations
• 18,000+ ‘non-cyclists’ have got back onto a bike for our Challenges
• 6,000+ of these ‘non-cyclist’ participants are cycling regularly each week three months after taking part in the Challenge

Below is the analysis from the post project surveys that are carried out after each Challenge:

 

Who’s taking part?

On average 54% of participants are non and occasional cyclists – just the people we want to influence the behaviour of.

This pie chart shows the average breakdown of participants from 21 recent Challenges, based on their cycling behaviour before they took part in the Challenge

Behaviour change achieved

Analysis of the results of 21 Challenges has revealed the following.

On average:

• 37% of participants who were ‘non-cyclist’ before taking part in the Challenge are now cycling once a week or more often.
• 43% of ‘occasional cyclists’ are now cycling to work at least once a week.

A note about ‘non-cyclists’ and ‘occasional cyclists’

We define ‘non-cyclists’ as people who haven’t cycled in over a year or who have only cycled once or twice in the past 12 months before they took part in the Cycle Challenge.

We define ‘occasional cyclists’ as people who were cycling 1 – 3 times a month or about once a week before the Challenge.

 

Improving Results

The above results show that over the years as we’ve run more Challenges (and learned a thing or two in the process) we’re getting better results now than we were even in our highly successful UK pilot in Swindon back in 2008.

Looking forward to continuing to bring this successful programme to more towns and cities in the UK, Australia, Europe, North America and beyond!

We took a little break from using this blog as a way to promote what do and what we’ve achieved.  We launched a new website (http://partners.lovetoride.net/) which superseded the information we had here on this blog.

We’re now coming full circle and are going to use this blog as an ideal way of keeping people up to date with our latest results and news.  So watch this space…