The New and Improved…BTWD Challenge!

Bike to Work Month Team Bike Challenge (TBC) has been revamped! Originally created by former Bay Area Bicycle Coalition Executive Director, Andrew Casteel, TBC was intended to gamify bicycling. Through TBC folks logged their miles during bike month and competed against each other as individuals, as teams, as companies.Boy did you all take it seriously! You took it so seriously that any time we changed the rules, you let us know exactly how you felt. One year we changed the rules to advantage newby riders and many of you didn’t like that at all. When companies suspected cheating oh boy did we hear about it! We’re not complaining. It shows how effective TBC has been in getting more folks to ride and that’s the point.Over the years however TBC got clunky. You all became impatient, demanding that the website be updated. This is Silicon Valley after all and why should we endure a slow app/website that doesn’t have all the latest bells and whistles?We listened and after a bumpy two years we are excited to announce the selection of Love to Ride to replace Team Bike Challenge.Love to Ride is a program used by the National Bike to Work Day folks along with other countries worldwide. It has all the same concepts and major elements of the old Team Bike Challenge but there are some changes. For example, if you’re not into competition, you can just log your miles and track how you're doing. If you love competition, form teams of 8 and then your team competes against 9 other teams in a sporting style bracket system.Guaranteed these new rules will be loved and hated. That said, we hope you’ll keep the end goal in mind - To create a fun way to get folks to ride more.One last thing. You, dear readers, are already in the choir, meaning you already are inclined to ride. As such, we rely on you to talk to your friends and inspire them to ride. And good news! Love to Ride gives you points as an “encourager,” someone who convinces others to ride.So, sign up for Love to Ride here. Click around, explore it, form a team, get others to sign up. Most importantly, get out there, log those miles and show everyone how fun it is to ride a bike for every day use. As an aside, at the end of May, we will have a party to announce the winners. Prizes include the very valuable bragging rights along with an SVBC jersey.