Big bunches of bikes beat bumper to bumper boredom beautifully on BTWD
It was a fantastic Bike to Work Day this year! Counts of people on bikes in both Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties were up this year: counts at 80 Energizer Stations in Santa Clara showed a 19% increase in butts on bikes on Thursday morning, while at the 36 Energizer Stations organized by our friends at Commute.org in San Mateo County, cycle sightings were up a whopping 30%! That means a combined Bike to Work Day participation boost of 23% in the two counties! Check out the photos to the right to see what the morning looked like.
Our Bike Away From Work Bash also smashed previous records this year.* We got to party down with 170 of you, in what was unarguably our most impressive Bash thus far! Our sincere thanks go to the pro-bike folks at the San José Department of Transportation, who graciously offered to host us in City Hall's gleaming Rotunda. We attribute the boost in attendance to the higher morning commute participation rate (meaning more folks got party fliers) and the boost in media coverage this year. Which brings me to the next round of self back-patting...
The press has been all about bikes for the past month or so. Naturally, SVBC and Bike to Work Day have gotten nods in much of this coverage. A sampling of some of the recent writeups:
- Our fashionable and fearless leader Corinne Winter was profiled on SanJose.com.
- Los Gatos Patch pointed to the SVBC website and our employer bicycle commuting workshops as one of “21 Ways to Honor the Earth.”
- Sal Pizarro covered our San José City Council Bike Month kickoff in the Merc.
- Even the tech talk at Wired Magazine has turned to bikes lately. I was quoted in an article about Google's bike obsession. (Of course, I also discussed the fantastic bike programs at companies like Facebook, Intuit, and SunPower, but failed to cram all my compliments into a one-sentence snippet. Lesson learned!)
How was your Bike to Work Day? What are you up to for the rest of Bike Month? Are you participating in the Team Bike Challenge? Will you be joining SVBC as we offer free valet bike parking this month and next? (Scroll your eyeballs to the right on our volunteer page.) Share your stories and ponder your plans in the comments section below!
* Bike Bash photos coming soon. Someone forgot his wife's camera at home on the dining table this morning...
