Month: September 2017

 

This October, we’re running the first of many national campaigns across the US to encourage more people to enjoy the benefits of riding. Everyone is invited to take part and form a team of 8 other riders. We’ve some great prizes that people can win, including a new bike, bike gear, b

We made a little video for our partners in cities, advocacy groups, regional and state government, Transporation Management Associations and other organizations who we partner with to run our bicycle encouragement programs locally.

 

 

Got questions?

Keen to promote Biketober in your area?  We can send you a promo pack to make it easy to spread the word and get more people involved.

Get in touch! – partners@lovetoride.net

 

We’re really excited to be launching a new Department for Transport-funded pilot project with NUS and the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges (EAUC). We’re working with eight universities and leading behaviour change specialists to get more students and staff riding bikes and help achieve the government’s goal of doubling cycling by 2025.

Earlier this year NUS surveyed 2,000 members about cycling, and the results were fascinating:

• 56% of respondents hadn’t been on a bike for over a year, with women overrepresented in this group
• 45% were unaware of cycle training that was on offer at their institution
• Those who do cycle overwhelmingly do so for transport and cite environmental reasons for riding (this is rarely the case with respondents to our surveys in other contexts)
• 30% of students who do have access to a bike don’t use it at all, despite the most important factors when travelling to University being time, cost and convenience.
• Not feeling safe is the most commonly cited barrier to cycling whilst at university

With these and many other insights into students’ travel habits and attitudes towards cycling, we’ll be working with our partners to devise interventions that help overcome barriers and get more students on bikes.

Project teams at each of the universities are soon to receive a batch of UniCycle t-shirts and a GoPro camera. We’re working with them to devise ways to get students on bikes at the beginning of the academic year and we’ll be convening in late October to share ideas and hold an ISM workshop with Andrew Darnton.

We’ll be sharing insights from the project throughout the year. In the meantime, 80 universities are already taking part in Cycle September (and one of our cohort, the University of Sheffield, is currently out in front!) and every university and college in the UK is invited to join in to get more students and staff cycling.

Find out more and register here (it only takes a minute): lovetoride.net

If you’d like to find out more about UniCycle, including how to register your interest in good time for the 2018/9 programme, please email unicycle@lovetoride.org for more info.

Cycle September – the main event of our Year of the Bike – kicked off last Friday. As of Monday 4 September, we’ve already had 7,000 people log a ride – a phenomenal start that puts us well on track to meet (or beat!) our previous results (we’ve averaged 18,500 participants in the National Cycle Challenge over the last two years).

This year, as well as the name change, we’re inviting everyone to log their rides with Ride Report, a new app that automagically records your rides by running in the background on your phone – you don’t even have to press start or stop! This gives us great data to help local authorities plan better infrastructure, plus we get a much more realistic picture of real transport cycling behaviour because it picks up every short journey, unlike other apps. To encourage people to use Ride Report, we’re giving away £500 to spend on a new bike to one lucky winner who downloads the app and uses it for Cycle September.

 

Also new this year is an Organisation Page feature that, for a small cost, allows organisations with multiple sites in the UK to join them up so they can work together to climb the leaderboard. If you’d like to find out more about this exciting opportunity to get your colleagues cycling nationwide, please write to sam@lovetoride.org

Once again we’ve got a mouth-watering prizes pot, and everyone who takes part will go into the draw for Raleigh bikes, a trip to Brighton or Berlin, top-notch cycling luggage from Carradice of Nelson, amazing T2 helmets from Torch and incredible, innovative locks from Litelok (not to mention our global prize of a trip to Italy or San Francisco). There are lots of other prizes locally and nationally and we hope to break our record for prizewinners too – last year we gave away 877 prizes for riding and encouraging!

 

We’ll be unveiling local and national leaderboards later this week, so please register yourself and your workplace to start earning points now! It only takes a minute to register at lovetoride.net

 

Happy cycling!