Author: Thomas Stokell

After a year and a half of encouraging other people onto bikes with Challenge for Change, James Butcher, one of our project managers, has decided it’s time for him to follow his own advice and hit the road on an epic cycling adventure.

Armed with a one way ticket, their bikes and a tent, James and his girlfriend Sarah have headed to Alaska. Their plan is to pedal down the west coast of the Americas over the next two years on a journey of up to 15,000 miles!

James explained: “The plan is deliberately vague, but as long as we keep the sea on our right hand side then surely we can’t go wrong!”

“We reckon that bike speed is the perfect travelling pace to really immerse yourself in another country. On a bike you experience a whole world of fantastic and random meetings, sights, tastes and sounds that you would just never get to experience through the window of a car or bus.”

“It’s been great working as part of the Challenge for Change team. I’ll certainly be looking out for how other countries are getting more people to take to their bikes and reporting back!”

Happy Travels/Feliz Viaje James and Sarah!

 

Sam and Sophie wielded the Challenge for Change flag and presented at the annual TPM conference in Liverpool, which saw over 250 attendees across the two days.

The plenary session opened with Norman Baker MP announcing recently confirmed outcomes of the Local Sustainable and Transport Fund, alongside speakers on themes from Personal Rapid Transport to the logistical transport nightmare that is the 2012 Olympics.

This year the conference launched a new “Dragons’ Den” style session allowing young professionals a chance to showcase their ideas or projects on the broad topic of “originality and innovation in the sustainable transport arena”. With cycling tying in nicely with this brief, Sophie presented on “How can we convert intentions into actions: are the answers on the back of a postcard?”. A five minute speech was followed by intensive questions from both the panel and the floor. The Dragon’s went with the facts, recognising the value in investing in a project already supported with evidence and so Challenge for Change took home the £250 research prize money and more importantly the winning accolade.

Next up, Sam took the plunge by putting across his presentation on the new Prezi software – taking his audience on a roller coaster ride through his presentation entitled: “Who are the next 4% of cyclists?”. Sam whipped up interest in our innovative behaviour change programmes, using data from thousands of Challenge for Change cyclists.

Transport planners are a niche bunch, with the tools and knowledge to implement what we already know works. We’ll keep you posted with any developments from the event.

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!