Apr 20th, 2010
Utah Bike Summit
SOAR attended Utah’s first bike summit last weekend in Salt Lake City. It was a super encore to the first Salt Lake City Bike Summit in 2009, and an essential ingredient to helping our great state move up in the bike friendly rankings.
We met citizens, advocates, business owners, commuters and politicians passionate about making Utah a bike-friendly state. They gave insightful presentations with lots of important take-aways. Here are a few that stuck out to us:
Stop making excuses- Jeff Miller, the guest of honor and the president/CEO of the Alliance for Biking and Walking, summarized what he has learned about the evolution of bike culture around the world. It may seem like Europe has been bike friendly since the beginning of time, but it has taken generations of advocates and enthusiasts to put that culture into place. The United States can put the same system into place, but it’s going to take comparable effort.
Economic impact- Bike travel has a lot of economic implications for the states that support it. What a cool idea to ride your bike from city to city, stopping at campgrounds and communities that cater to cyclists. You think of the world in a whole new way when you consider exploring it by bike. I’m excited to see the day, as someone at the summit suggested, when we can leave our front doors in Salt Lake and tour the entire state of Utah, confident that there will be safe bike routes and bike-friendly cities along the way.
Addressing Salt Lake’s air quality doesn’t have to be a political matter- As Senator Wayne Niederhauser suggested at the summit, Salt Lake City has a horrendous air quality problem that needs to be addressed and fixed. Reducing carbon emissions has to become the non-partisan solution for improving Salt Lake’s air quality. On bad days, Salt Lake has some of the poorest air quality in the nation. One summit participant said the air quality is so bad that she is considering leaving Salt Lake after five years of bike commuting year round because the pollution has caused her asthma.
To read the Utah Bike Summit agenda, please click here.
Donate to the Utah Bicycle Coalition and donate to the cause of cycling.
Elizabeth – nice post – thanks for sharing some of this and kudos for the link and encouraging folks to join the Utah Bicycle Coalition.
Anyone interested in knowing some of the facts and figures on biking and walking in their city or state should check out the Alliance for Biking & Walking’s Benchmarking Report. Go to http://www.PeoplePoweredMovement.org/benchmarking
Jeff