Outride's reputation is built on Riding for Focus, a six-to-eight-week middle school cycling program running in more than 400 schools across the U.S. and Canada and reaching roughly half a million students each year. The organization’s roots trace back to Mike Sinyard, the founder and chairman of Specialized Bicycle Components, reading a 2012 Bicycling article titled "Riding Is My Ritalin." Recognizing his own undiagnosed ADHD after reading, Sinyard then called the researcher quoted in the piece to ask what it would take to prove the theory. That call then led to the creation of the Specialized Foundation and later, Outride.

What makes the organization stand out is that it funded the science alongside the programming, rather than after it. Working with Dr. Allan Reiss's lab at Stanford, Outride-supported researchers used functional near-infrared spectroscopy, an imaging method worn under a helmet and wired to a pack on the rider's back, to monitor blood flow in adolescents' brains in real time while they rode. The 2019 findings, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, showed improved prefrontal cortex oxygenation and cognition in teens with ADHD following riding a bike. A follow-up study found that while riding, the brain activity patterns of teens with ADHD came to resemble those of their peers without it. A 2023 study of more than 1,200 middle schoolers found measurable gains in psychosocial well-being after the program, holding up against established risk factors including gender, socioeconomic status, sleep, and screen time. A review published this spring synthesized 87 studies connecting cycling to attention, reaction time, and cognitive performance.

That's the story I knew going in: a link between bikes, PE class, attention, and behavior, with a real body of literature supporting it.

PeopleForBikes is a proud supporter of Outride, so I arrived already believing in the work. What I didn't expect was how much of the day would be about the other end of the lifespan, or that the two halves would turn out to be the same argument.

Claire Day of the Alzheimer's Association opened with a line that reframed the whole afternoon: about a quarter of the blood from every heartbeat goes to your brain. We've all heard some version of “What's good for the heart is good for the brain.” Now, the research is catching up to the intuition.

Day then walked through the U.S. POINTER study, a two-year, five-site trial testing whether combining lifestyle interventions, aerobic and resistance exercise, the MIND diet, cognitive training, and cardiovascular risk management produces more benefit than any single factor alone. Participants in the structured intervention showed a statistically significant cognitive advantage over the self-guided group. In practical terms: roughly two years were knocked off the cognitive aging clock.

The part that stuck with me is that the benefit held regardless of age, genotype, ethnicity, or existing cardiovascular risk. Everyone got the upside.

Then, the cycling-specific data. A 13-year study of more than 480,000 participants linked active commuting, cycling prominently among the modes, to a 19% reduction in dementia risk and a 22% reduction in Alzheimer's risk. For younger-onset dementia, the reduction ran as high as 40%.

For an industry that has spent decades making the case that bikes are good for people, this is a different kind of argument. Those aren't vibes, they’re data-driven facts. 

Gene Girimonte followed with the personal angle. Girimonte spent years as the primary caregiver for his husband, who was diagnosed with both Alzheimer's and vascular dementia in 2011. Exhaustion, weight gain, high blood pressure, no focus — he described every warning sign of caregiver burnout. Then, he walked into a bike shop with leg braces and a cane, unsure whether he could still ride, and walked out with a bike.

Thirty thousand miles later, he rides 135 miles a week and raises money for the Alzheimer's Association on annual solo tours. Girimonte put it plainly: cycling replaced a sense of helplessness with hopefulness.

Carol Kachadoorian runs the 50+ Cycling Survey, the result of five years of longitudinal data from riders across the U.S. and Canada, ranging from age 50 to 90+. As far as I can tell, it's the only sustained data set of its kind. A few findings worth calling out:

Cycling supports identity and purpose, not just fitness. People aren't riding to hit a heart rate zone. They're riding because it's who they are.

Riding adapts rather than ends. One 76 year old in Kachadoorian’s data is doing 40-mile rides multiple times a week. Another 76 year old decided she's done with 40-mile rides, but is riding differently instead. Both are still riders.

E-bikes extend the riding timeline. While they’re both an independence tool and a safety tool, a meaningful share of riders still resist them, which is a positioning problem as much as a product one.

Caregiving quietly erodes ride time. Carol is a caregiver herself. She has less time to ride and has lost her riding partner. It’s not a churn reason anyone captures in a survey field, but it's real.

Safe places to ride drives everyday decisions. She moved into a new senior living community and won't ride the street out front after two near misses. It took her weeks to find a safe route to the grocery store.

Her sharpest point was aimed at planners and engineers, and I'd extend it to product teams: start designing for the full range of riders, including the 76 year old still doing 40-mile weeks and the one who changed what their riding looks like. Longer signal crossing times. Lower curbs. Better signage at decision points. Design for the riders you actually have.

Dan Burden made the same case by living it. He's 82, rode from Alaska to Argentina in 1972, helped launch Bikecentennial and the TransAmerica Trail, and now leads walking audits and works with Blue Zones on built environments. He rides with electric assist these days in Port Townsend. He also offered the statistic I've repeated three times since hearing it: children today average about ten minutes of outdoor time a day. Prisoners are guaranteed one to two hours.


Lauren Schuck brought the conversation back to the beginning of the lifespan and the core of Outride's work.

Schuck started with mechanism rather than outcome — what is it about a bike, specifically? Communication, because you're riding in a group of 30 and you need hand signals and awareness of the rider ahead. Resilience — the confidence that comes from the first pedal strokes you ever take. Time in trees and a dose of awe. Social connection, or the opposite — time alone with your own head. All of these characteristics stacking on top of the physical activity, not instead of it.

Then comes the access gap, which is where it stops being abstract. One-in-four students entering Outride's programs have no access to a bike at home. At some schools, that number reaches 80%, and it skews higher in urban environments. Fifteen percent arrive with low riding confidence — they either don't know how or don't feel safe trying. And as Schuck pointed out, nobody volunteers for a ride they don't feel confident taking.

Riding for Focus is built to close both gaps at once. Schools apply for a grant and receive a fleet of bikes, helmets, and a six-to-eight-week curriculum that runs inside PE. Pre- and post-surveys track confidence, well-being, screen time, and physical activity.

The results she showed were the most persuasive material of the day.

At the Craig School in Southern California, which serves students with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and executive function challenges, the share of students reporting they didn't know how to ride a bike went from 23% to zero. Confidence climbed more than twenty points. Riding at least once a week outside of class rose from 27% to 46%, and students who never rode dropped from 55% to 23%. The program didn't just teach a skill — it changed behavior after the bell.

In Wisconsin, teacher Ryan McKinney compared students in a cycling and action sports intervention against a standard enrichment class. The cycling group had markedly fewer office referrals, both minor and major, and showed gains in reading and math. His district was sold. He's been running it for years and now gets kids riding before school.

And across Outride's aggregate school data, there's a clean positive association between how often students ride and their reported well-being. That relationship holds when you control for gender, socioeconomic status — and total physical activity. Something specific is happening with riding that isn't explained by exercise alone.

The closing panel, moderated by Outride's Chazz Robinson, is what I'd want every brand and retailer in this industry to hear. Three practitioners, three completely different operating environments, and a shared answer about what implementation really costs.

Shawn Byrd teaches PE at Flat Rock Middle School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and runs the program for roughly 500 students on an A/B day rotation, so every kid rides at least once a week. Five hundred permission slips came back, and then she had to figure out how to teach helmet fit, bike fit, and pre-ride checks to classes of 30+ students. Her solution was to train four or five student leaders per class and have them teach their classmates, with the rule that if their classmates didn't pass, they didn't pass. Students came back to her frustrated. She sent them back to reteach. "That's what teachers do," she said.

Then her district mismanaged $50 million and there was no money to repair bikes. She called a contact in the local bike community, who fixed what he could himself and took the rest to a shop and paid for the repairs out of pocket. Her assessment of the program's impact: the kids are on bikes, so now the teachers want to be on bikes, too. The culture of the school changed.

Lisa Chee works in health promotion and disease prevention for the Indian Health Service in the Navajo Area — a service population of roughly 240,000 people across 27,000 square miles spanning Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico that’s about the size of West Virginia.

She used funds from the Special Diabetes Program for Indians to bring five modular pump tracks to the Navajo Nation. It took two years. Because Navajo Nation land is held in trust, she had to identify lease holders willing to host a track, then coordinate across federal, state, and tribal jurisdictions, each with its own policies. As a federal entity, IHS couldn't move the dirt itself — so land lease holders did the site prep, Outride supported installation, and Silver Stallion sent crews to assemble the tracks. In February, she was driving through snow to meet delivery drivers at roadside and lead them to sites too remote to find.

When the last track went in, kids from an after-school program were waiting on it. One asked how long it would be there. She got to tell him it would be there whenever he wanted to ride.

John Glodek has taught physical and health education for 23 years at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Germantown, Maryland, and has run Riding for Focus since 2018. His school has close to 900 students. Only four or five ride bikes to school.

His challenge wasn't logistics. It was trust. Taking 32 middle schoolers off campus for a 47-minute period and bringing them back safely isn't something an administrator approves on day one — it took years of practice, lessons, and demonstrated competence. What he's built since has changed the community around the school. Drivers now see a controlled, predictable group of middle schoolers on the road every fall, and they stop to tell him they're glad the program is back.

He also told a story about a sixth grader who spent four days unable to get started and stopping on the bike. Every day, he told her he'd give her one more day. When she finally rode, the entire class stopped and applauded. Her parents emailed him — they hadn't had time to teach her, and school was where she got the chance.

When asked what she wished more people understood, Lisa Chee said she wished people knew how holistically cycling changes a person. John Glodek said he wished more people simply believed in the power of the bicycle for kids growing up right now. Shawn Byrd said her motivation is the students who see her on morning duty and ask whether they're riding today.

Four things I'm taking back to the industry:

1. The 50+ rider is a growth segment, not a retention problem. We tend to treat aging riders as leakage from the funnel. The data says they're highly motivated, identity-driven, and willing to adapt — if the product, the fit, the service model, and the route network let them.

2. Brain health is a policy argument. We already make the economic, and safety cases for infrastructure. Dementia risk reduction reaches audiences our usual framing doesn't, and as the population ages, that argument only gets stronger.

3. Access is the constraint, not interest. One in four kids without a bike at home is a market fact as much as an access fact. The Craig School data shows what happens when you remove the barrier: kids don't just learn to ride, they keep riding on their own time. Riding for Focus goes open access by the end of the year, which lowers the cost of entry for any community that wants to run it.

4. The programs run on our industry's back, often informally. A bike shop volunteer paying for repairs because a school district went broke. Specialized supplying equipment. Silver Stallion sending crews into remote communities. Mechanics being trained because there are suddenly more bikes to keep running. That ecosystem is currently held together by individual goodwill. It could be held together by strategy.

We've spent a long time in this industry saying bikes make life better. We're now at the point where we can say how, by how much, and for whom, from a sixth grader in Germantown who'd never been taught to ride, to a caregiver in Sonoma County who wasn't sure he still could.

PeopleForBikes is a proud supporter of Outride. Outride's Riding for Focus curriculum is slated to be fully accessible to the public for free by the end of the year. The Alzheimer's Association's lifestyle tools from the U.S. POINTER study are available through its Rethink Your Brain resource.

Your Brain Is Better on a Bike — and the Evidence Is Getting Hard to Ignore

PeopleForBikes works to empower businesses, suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers across the bike industry to help grow opportunities for more people to ride bikes more often and shape a better future for the next generation of riders. By working with PeopleForBikes, you can help build a more connected and bikeable world right in your own backyard.

Know your community’s City Ratings score. PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings program measures communities' progress in creating safe and connected bike networks. The score’s recreational component measures access to parks, trails, and pump tracks. 

Champion infrastructure projects in your community. Our National Bike Project Tracker, part of the Great Bike Infrastructure Project, highlights planned bike projects across the country. Identify nearby projects you’re passionate about and help get them across the finish line. If you know about a project that isn't in our tracker, let us know.

Connect with state and local advocacy groups in your area and ask how you can help projects get funded and built. Find your nearest advocacy group here. 

Consider giving your employees a volunteer day to support local advocacy groups or encourage them to attend important public meetings to advocate for better bike infrastructure.

Sponsor an event like a community bike ride or an open streets event to support the efforts of your local advocacy group.

Join a local business association to emphasize the economic benefits of bikeable communities and encourage their support of bike projects near you. 

Ask your employees and customers to join PeopleForBikes’ newsletter to receive advocacy alerts to support bicycling projects and pro-bike policies in their communities.  


Cultivate local donors to support PeopleForBikes’ work improving bicycling nationwide.

Host a fundraiser and encourage your network and customers to donate and help PeopleForBikes advance bicycling in your community.

Send a fundraising email to your customers on behalf of PeopleForBikes. 


PeopleForBikes’ has numerous valuable resources to help guide your advocacy efforts:  

The PeopleForBikes Bike Advocacy Playbook provides 15 arguments for better biking with links to dozens of talking points and studies. 

PeopleForBikes’ Guide to Effective Local Bike Advocacy offers strategies to ensure your advocacy efforts have a lasting impact.

PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Guide for Safe and Connected Infrastructure highlights the most effective legislative strategies to improve local bike infrastructure:

Passing state and local funding for bike infrastructure 

Adopting Complete Streets mandates that require safe bike infrastructure as part of road projects

Advancing bike infrastructure through climate legislation

Use talking points from our supplemental guides for each policy area to help push for change in your community.

If projects or policies are at risk, let us know. We can rally support through letters to local officials, PeopleForBikes Advocacy Alerts, and our VoteForBikes campaign. 

Your involvement as a member of the bike industry is crucial in shaping bikeable communities. Thank you for being an essential part of the movement to transform the U.S. into the best place in the world to ride a bike. Together, we can make biking safe and accessible for everyone nationwide and welcome more people to the joys and benefits of riding.

For more information and support, reach out to a PeopleForBikes expert:

Martina Haggerty, Vice President of Infrastructure — martina@peopleforbikes.org

Own Your Backyard: An Industry Guide to Supporting Local Bike Infrastructure

Making your community better for biking starts with you! Whether you have five minutes or an entire afternoon, PeopleForBikes developed some simple steps you can take to improve biking in your backyard. 

Sign up for PeopleForBikes' newsletter to be the first to know when you can take action for better biking in your community, like sending an email to your state representative when pro-bike legislation or funding is up for a vote.

Become a PeopleForBikes Foundation member to support our work.

Reach out to your local elected officials via email.

Find your mayor or city councilor’s email. If you aren’t sure who your local elected officials are or how to email them, click here. 

Send an email introducing yourself and explaining why better biking matters to you. Here is an example to help you get started:


Hello, my name is [name], and I live in [neighborhood]. I’d love to talk to you about opportunities to make our community safer and more accessible for people who ride bikes. 

[Insert a personal anecdote here. You can mention your favorite local place to ride, a particular street that could be better for biking, or how you want safer routes for your kids to bike to school or the park. You can also explain why you are passionate about this work — public or personal health, sustainability, road safety, active transportation options, etc.]


According to PeopleForBikes, our City Ratings score, which measures the quality of our low-stress bike network, is [#]. I think we can do better, and I would like to share PeopleForBikes’ Effective Legislative Strategies for Better Biking, which explains how communities like ours can become better places to ride a bike for people of all ages and abilities. 


After you make a connection, keep the conversation going by inviting your elected official on a bike ride or walk around your community to show them where you ride, where you wish you could ride, and where improvements can be made. 

Check out PeopleForBikes’ Own Your Backyard campaign for more ideas and tips, including how to connect with and support local groups already working to improve biking in your community. 

Thanks for helping make our world a better place through bikes!

How to Advocate for Better Biking in Your Community

With bicycling participation increasing across the U.S., it is critical that we support and continue this growth by creating more great places to ride. Safe, connected, and accessible places to ride are essential to getting more people biking more often and improving road safety nationwide. Both the Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Urban Bikeway Design Guide from the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) offer communities clear paths to making better bike infrastructure a reality. 

In December, AASHTO released the fifth edition of the Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities, marking a significant step forward for the organization’s guidance for U.S. communities of all shapes and sizes to design safe, effective, and inclusive bike infrastructure. AASHTO represents transportation departments across the U.S. and in addition to its other activities supporting transportation work, offers guidance for engineers and designers on geometric design for highways and streets.

The latest edition of the long-awaited AASHTO guide reflects several advances in design thinking, safety research, and technological innovation since its last publication in 2012. The fifth edition includes nine new chapters and significant revisions to seven others, covering topics including:  

Choosing the right bikeway type for different contexts 

Designing shared-use paths, protected bike lanes, side paths, and bike boulevards/neighborhood greenways

Improving intersections, traffic signals, and roundabouts for people riding bikes

NACTO introduced the third edition of its Urban Bikeway Design Guide in January. NACTO is a collaborative network of 100 cities and transit agencies across North America. By fostering the exchange of innovative transportation ideas and practices, NACTO empowers communities to tackle shared challenges and develop solutions that address transportation issues.

The updated NACTO guide offers communities a comprehensive toolkit for designing safer, more accessible, connected bike networks. Endorsed by the U.S. Department of Transportation and used widely across North America, the guide goes beyond focusing on individual bike projects to emphasize the importance of cohesive networks that cater to diverse users. 

Implementing signal phasing strategies that improve safety for people walking and biking 

Improving accessibility for pedestrians walking along and crossing bikeways

Operating and maintaining bike facilities

Maintaining bike facilities during construction disruptions

Planning for newer mobility options like e-bikes, cargo bikes, and scooters

“Access to transportation means access to opportunity,” said NACTO Executive Director Ryan Russo in a press release. “The third edition of the Urban Bikeway Design Guide takes all that we’ve learned from hundreds of projects across North America. It provides more than just a kit of parts for designing a bike lane: it provides the how-to blueprint for creating a whole bike network for people of all ages, abilities, and identities.”


Both guides emphasize the importance of a flexible, context-sensitive approach and equip communities with the practical information needed to address unique challenges with design solutions that prioritize safety and usability. Advocates for better biking can leverage these updated guides to continue the momentum for better biking, break down barriers to riding for vulnerable or marginalized groups, and create a safer future for people of all ages and abilities.


With these guides now available, it’s time to put them into action and make our communities great places to ride a bike.

You can help by encouraging your state, city, or town to formally adopt the fifth edition of the AASHTO Bicycle Guide and the third edition of NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide. You can also ask your elected officials and decision-makers to bring in experts to conduct training sessions on both guides to ensure state and local engineers and designers are well equipped to build high quality bike projects in your community.  

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To further support the adoption and implementation of great places to ride, PeopleForBikes offers two powerful tools for communities looking to improve biking locally: City Ratings and the Great Bike Infrastructure Project. Our City Ratings program evaluates and scores communities on how good they are for biking based on the quality of their low-stress bike networks, identifying strengths and areas for improvement. The Great Bike Infrastructure Project complements City Ratings by tracking thousands of planned bike projects across the U.S. and offering guidance to accelerate the development of safe, fun, and connected bike networks.

New Resources Offer Guidance on Building Great Places to Ride

As the popularity of electric bicycles (e-bikes) continues to rise, it is important for states and municipalities to understand the best methods for regulating this rapidly growing sector of the bike industry and keeping everyone safe on our shared roads and trails.

A groundswell of new proposed legislation at both the state and local levels has occurred in the last few years, and PeopleForBikes is actively involved in drafting and influencing those laws. We also continue engaging with advocates and government leaders on the best approaches to safely and successfully regulating e-bikes as there is a clear need for laws that are reasonable and consistent to keep e-bike riders and our communities safe.

In response to this need, PeopleForBikes launched our E-Bike Legislative Toolkit, compiling best practices, offering model safety-related legislation, and clearly highlighting the intersection of bike infrastructure and education. The toolkit offers a foundation to make it easier to propose and implement safety-related policies and programs while considering each communities’ unique needs and governmental structures.

We invite advocates, retailers, and policymakers across all levels of government to utilize this resource, reach out to us with questions, and borrow what works best for your community in creating effective, equitable, and harmonized e-bike laws. 

PeopleForBikes recommends that government leaders and advocates consider nine key priorities when addressing the safety and regulatory aspects of electric bicycles:

CREATE INFRASTRUCTURE: Prioritize funding and building connected bike networks to improve safety.

ADOPT THE 3-CLASS SYSTEM: Clearly define e-bikes using the three-class model and federal definitions set by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

REGULATE OUT-OF-CLASS PRODUCTS + ANTI-TAMPERING: Address unsafe products exceeding power and speed limits set by law.

ENABLE CLASS 1 EMTB ACCESS: Define where e-bikes can be ridden both on and off road, including speed limits on shared paths.

CHAMPION BATTERY AND ELECTRICAL SAFETY: Ensure e-bikes meet applicable safety standards for electrical systems and lithium-ion batteries.

FUND E-BIKE INCENTIVES: Create equitable incentive programs to make e-bikes more affordable.

PROMOTE EDUCATION AND RIDER SAFETY: Implement effective rider education programs.

OPPOSE REGISTRATION AND INSURANCE REQUIREMENTS: Avoid unnecessary registration and insurance for e-bikes, which don't significantly reduce road fatalities.

PROVIDE LANDLORD GUIDANCE ON E-BIKES: Encourage landlords to allow safe storage of certified e-bikes.

With so many possibilities and limited resources, it's important to first focus on the greatest needs of your community. We strongly suggest improving infrastructure as the single most important strategy to provide the most impactful and lasting returns on safety and participation.  How does your state and its communities stack up in terms of City Ratings and pending infrastructure projects? Do you have laws in place requiring Complete Streets design standards and allowing communities to lower their speed limits? Is there adequate funding for projects?

Assuming you’re already making strides on infrastructure and growing ridership, you may be hearing concerns about how electric bicycles are being used, the kinds of e-mobility devices appearing on streets and trails, younger riders on e-bikes, or the safety of lithium-ion batteries. PeopleForBikes is very involved in all of these areas, and the E-Bike Legislative Toolkit contains our best advice on addressing them. With these resources, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to proactively respond to safety concerns and can leverage the work PeopleForBikes, our advocacy partners, and other states and communities have already accomplished.

Last, while we like to focus on the positive, we know that sometimes a defensive battle must be fought against proposed legislation that will negatively impact bike riders or the community.  Confronted with a bad e-bike bill or even a proposal for legislation? Please reach out to us!


If you have any questions about the toolkit or crafting state and local policies or programs related to bicycles and electric bicycles, please reach out to PeopleForBikes Vice President of Government Relations Dr. Ash Lovell at ash@peopleforbikes.org.

Advance Safe and Successful E-Bike Policies With PeopleForBikes’ New Toolkit

In order to make our vision of transforming America into the best place in the world to ride a bike a reality, PeopleForBikes is committed to supporting local bike advocacy efforts in communities across the country. To maximize your impact and success, advocates must have a message that resonates with local residents, authentically engages new advocates and the larger community, and builds broad coalitions of support. 

From successfully communicating your message to adopting inclusive approaches to road safety, our Guide to Effective Local Bike Advocacy covers the most essential tactics to help grow bicycling in your backyard. Informed by years of advocacy investments in communities of all sizes, we designed this guide to set your local advocates and advocacy organizations up for success. 

To support your organization's development, assess your strengths, and identify areas for improvement, we also created a self-evaluation scorecard. By honestly evaluating your organization's performance in critical areas, you can create targeted strategies to enhance your impact.

Access PeopleForBikes’ Local Advocacy Self-Evaluation Scorecard

Lead with issues everyone can relate to, even those who don’t bike. Successfully implementing bike infrastructure and policy changes hinges on your ability to garner support from people who might not bike often or at all. The great news is that most people are on board with building quality bike projects, especially when they are part of broader investments like improved roads, sidewalks, parks, and public transit. Why? Because it means more options for getting where you need or want to go, more opportunities for outdoor recreation, and safer streets for everyone, no matter how they choose to travel. 

Start with the problems that bicycling can help solve: road safety for all road users, transportation affordability, public health, economic development, tourism, sustainability, and access to jobs, education, and recreational opportunities. Create talking points that highlight your community's challenges and show how bicycling can be a part of the solution to addressing them. When you focus on value-driven messaging, you’ll gain more support. 

Check out our Bike Advocacy Playbook and supplemental guides for creating bike infrastructure through legislation for talking points and data to help you get started. 

Advocate for a complete transportation network, not just a bike project. When advocates establish and promote a vision for fully connected, comfortable transportation networks, more community members support their work. Complete networks allow everyone, whether they’re walking, rolling, or biking, to move around their community with safety and ease by including safe and comfortable sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, shared-use paths, slow-speed streets, and convenient access to recreational opportunities and transit options. Getting community members to understand the importance of a single bike project can be challenging. By presenting the project within the context of a larger, citywide vision, you’ll help folks connect the dots. 

Learn about the importance of low-stress bike networks and how they impact PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings scores.

List your highest priority projects and policies on your website and highlight them through email, social media, and in-person or virtual meetings. If your organization can only accomplish five things this year, what should they be? What projects and policies are critical to making your community better for bicycling? Publicly sharing your priorities helps unify your supporters around clear goals and lets everyone know how they can best assist you in reaching them.

Community engagement is vital to building bike projects and passing pro-bike policies. While genuine and fair community involvement varies from place to place, some methods work everywhere and are key to increasing trust and equity.

Engage early, often, and in creative ways to establish a continuous dialogue within the community. A proactive approach to engagement is key. The first time community members hear about a bike project should not be when it is about to be implemented. Embrace engagement methods like Open Streets events, inclusive community rides, canvassing teams, and field ambassadors that attend community events to meet people where they are instead of expecting them to come to you. This approach demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity and enhances the effectiveness of your engagement strategies by reaching a broader audience.

Check out 5 Ways to Boost Community Engagement in Bike Advocacy.

Make sure your meetings are accessible. Are your meetings held in locations and at times that accommodate all individuals, making them feel welcome and capable of attending? Have you thought about child care, food, translation services, and wheelchair access? Ensuring inclusivity in the logistical aspects of your engagement efforts is a fundamental step toward fostering more diverse and representative participation.


Develop a diverse, inclusive coalition. In building a coalition, it's crucial to consider the composition of your group. Take a moment to reflect on whether your coalition primarily consists of confident "avid cyclists" or if it includes a diverse representation of casual riders, women, people of all ages, and individuals reflecting the broader demographic spectrum of your city. If the latter is not the case, your local advocacy group may need to work towards being more inclusive to address your community's varied needs and garner broader support. 

Effective advocacy coalitions also collaborate with voices outside of bike advocacy. Pedestrian advocacy groups, public transportation advocacy groups, youth groups, climate justice advocates, and even allies from places like the skateboarding community can all be valuable partners. For local advocacy organizations to grow and thrive, embracing diverse perspectives, even from those who may not currently engage in biking, is essential. By finding common ground and fostering a coalition that spans a range of interests, you can create a more robust movement advocating for improved recreational and transportation opportunities accessible to all.

Adopt an inclusive approach to road safety. While making our streets safe is a top priority, relying solely on enforcement doesn’t address people’s varied experiences with law enforcement. Advocates have the opportunity to push for an environment where biking is safe and accessible for everyone — including people of all ages, abilities, incomes, and backgrounds. An inclusive approach to road safety considers the various factors that contribute to a person's experience, fostering a biking culture that is welcoming and accommodating to everyone in the community.

Work with community members to ensure infrastructure investments are done in an equitable way across all neighborhoods. To achieve this, it's essential to identify the locations where your community has already constructed bike projects as well as areas that have suffered negative impacts from highways and unsafe pedestrian infrastructure. If neighborhoods have experienced exclusion or bike projects have mainly been built in affluent areas, it's imperative to actively work toward creating an equitable distribution of investments. This may involve reevaluating project locations in collaboration with local community members from impacted areas and advocating for more resources in historically underserved areas to understand and rectify those decisions' negative impacts on the community. 

USDOT’s Reconnecting Communities Program funds projects in disadvantaged communities that enhance access to employment, education, healthcare, food, and recreation; promote equitable development; and reconnect neighborhoods by removing or mitigating the impacts of highways or other transportation facilities that previously created social and physical barriers. 

You can utilize USDOT guidance to understand what neighborhoods are considered disadvantaged in your area. 

Mayors and other local elected officials greenlight projects and shape community vision. City, state, and county staff develop projects and policies and execute plans. You’ll need good relationships with all of these stakeholders to get things done. Looking for an effective way to garner their support? Invite them to go for a walk or hop on a bike. Spending time together on a ride (or two feet) offers firsthand insights into your community's challenges and opportunities and is a great way to build trust and lasting relationships. 


Cultivating positive relationships with local media is crucial to gaining fair and positive coverage of your projects and policies. Actively engage with reporters covering transportation or community issues. Provide them with well-researched information on the positive impacts of bike projects and policies and help facilitate access to community members who can speak to these issues. Be ready with clear and concise messages highlighting the community benefits for all road users, utilizing statistics, case studies, and local anecdotes. Organize media events or press conferences to showcase progress and encourage community members to share their first-hand experiences. By maintaining open communication with media representatives, you can become their go-to person and influence public perception to support your priorities.

Having a Level 5 leader is crucial for your organization’s success. Coined by Jim Collins, Level 5 leaders blend personal humility and an often quiet nature with unwavering determination and find success in getting people to follow a cause. Collins' research reveals a consistent pattern: The most successful companies have Level 5 leadership during transformative periods, challenging the sometimes-held belief that larger-than-life personalities are necessary for significant change. This leadership style is particularly relevant in an advocacy setting where the focus should be on the collective cause and community well-being. Moreover, the relentless determination inherent in Level 5 leadership is crucial in navigating the challenges of bike advocacy. 

Read Jim Collins’ Good to Great to learn more about Level 5 leaders.


LEGISLATION THAT GETS MORE BIKE INFRASTRUCTURE BUILT + MORE PEOPLE RIDING

Support transformative policy changes. One of the best ways to create a stronger advocacy base in your community is to get more people riding bikes by building safer and convenient places for them to ride.

PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Strategies for Safe and Connected Bike Infrastructure identifies the most effective state and local legislative changes that lead to great bike infrastructure. It includes diverse examples from communities and states across the country, including links to existing language and tips for adjusting language to suit your community’s needs. The four priorities identified in the guide are as follows:  

Passing state and local funding mechanisms for bike infrastructure

Improving road safety through reduced vehicular speeds, new design guidelines, and intersection safety improvements

Our supplemental guides include data-backed talking points to help you advocate for these changes in your community.  

UNLOCK YOUR COMMUNITY’S POTENTIAL WITH PEOPLEFORBIKES’ TOOLS + RESOURCES

Join Our Email List — Stay up to date with our newsletters and advocacy alerts to support biking in your community. 

City Ratings — Measure your community’s progress in becoming a great place for bikes and benchmark against other cities worldwide.

National Bike Project Tracker — Make sure your priority projects are in our public database of planned and proposed bike projects so we can connect local supporters to your work.

Legislative Guide to Advancing Bike Infrastructure — Dive into state and local strategies to create safe and connected bike infrastructure. Our supplemental guides include more details, including talking points to help advocate. 

SPRINT — Increase your City Ratings score and turn high-stress streets into low-stress streets using our SPRINT framework.

Your Bike Advocacy Playbook — Explore our 15-point, research-based fact sheet to help you push for change in your community.

VoteForBikes — PeopleForBikes can promote pro-bike measures on your local or state ballots.

Advocacy Alerts — Rally PeopleForBikes’ supporters around projects and policies in your community.

E-Bike Smart — Use our rider education program to help people of all ages and experience levels learn best practices for safe, responsible riding. For more information, check out our other e-bike tools and resources, including our E-Bike Incentive Toolkit and Model E-Bike Legislation framework. 

Community Grants — Apply for PeopleForBikes funding to support a local bike project near you.

PeopleForBikes’ Guide to Effective Local Bike Advocacy

This article about funding bike infrastructure is part of a series about the first and most important strategy promoted by PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Strategies Guide, a program of our Great Bike Infrastructure Project. Other strategies include mandating Complete Streets, centering bicycling as a solution to our climate challenge, and creating safer streets by lowering speeds, using modern design guidelines, and prohibiting right turns on red. 

Funding from local and state government sources is essential for the development of bike infrastructure in communities nationwide for three main reasons:

Those funds can unlock some of the $13 billion available in federal funding that can support the construction of bike infrastructure, as much of that federal money requires a local match.

Federal funding alone often isn’t enough to make the necessary impact.

State and local funding for bike infrastructure projects is easier to secure. 


The chart below shows the proportion of funding from each level of government in California and Virginia.

Finally, and fortunately, local support for bicycling is strong. Typically, policymakers at more local levels can see how bike infrastructure directly improves their communities and allocate much larger proportions of funding to bicycling than their federal counterparts. PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Strategies Guide includes talking points to further strengthen the case for local funding. 

Our legislative guide includes a comprehensive look at more than a dozen strategies that are available to fund bike infrastructure at the local and state levels. It gives examples of language used by policymakers and points to success stories across the country for each of the following sources:


Transportation Infrastructure Financing Districts

General Obligation (GO) Bonds represent a cornerstone for public infrastructure development. By backing projects with the full faith and credit of the issuing entity, these bonds have facilitated landmark initiatives, including the $460 million “Safe Mobility For All” bond approved by voters in Austin, Texas, in 2020. 


Local sales taxes can raise massive amounts of funding, but state authorization may be required. Our legislative guide shows how policymakers in Georgia negotiated with stakeholders at the state level in order to eventually approve millions of dollars at the local level. Gas taxes are historically an important source of revenue, but as more cars go electric, road tolls and congestion fees will increase in importance. 


Some states use climate mitigation programs to fund bike infrastructure. Special districts, such as transportation-focused tax increment financing districts, business improvement districts, and parking benefit districts, can be important sources of funding. Sacramento, California, has an innovative strategy to fund infrastructure through developer fees. Massachusetts mitigates the impact of rideshare services by charging a fee on all rideshare trips and using that fee to support safety improvements.


Unused utility corridors can make great bike trails — fees on undeveloped corridors incentivize utility companies to develop them into community amenities. States are also increasing income taxes on high-income earners to fund infrastructure. All of these examples and more can be found in the Legislative Strategies Guide. By exploring these options, municipalities, states, and advocates can find tailored solutions to meet their unique needs and challenges.


We encourage policymakers, community leaders, and bike advocates to consult our full guide for a detailed exploration of funding strategies. Together, we can turn our vision for safe, connected, and vibrant communities into a reality through more and better bike infrastructure.


Funding bike infrastructure is more than just an investment in cycling — it's an investment in healthier, more sustainable, and equitable communities. As we continue to advance the Great Bike Infrastructure Project, we can champion these funding strategies to ensure a bright future for biking nationwide.


To learn more about these real-world examples, what makes them effective, and how you can translate them into legislation for your community:

View our webinar recording on funding bike infrastructure

Review our Legislative Guide for Safe and Connected Bike Infrastructure 

Read our Supplemental Guide for Funding Bike Infrastructure, which includes data-backed talking points to help you advocate for change in your community 

Join our email list to ensure you don’t miss subsequent posts in this blog series, where we’ll provide in-depth insights into Complete Streets mandates, advancing bike infrastructure through climate legislation, and creating safer streets for all. 

Paving the Way for Complete Bike Networks: The Essential Role of State and Local Funding

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People for Bikes

How To

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PeopleForBikes’ Guide to Effective Local Bike Advocacy

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