The League of American Bicyclists has designated Roanoke as a Bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community. Cities are judged on their bicycle-friendliness in 5 areas, known as the “5 Es”: Engineering, Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, and Evaluation & Planning. Only 3 Virginia cities have received Bicycle Friendly designations: Charlottesville and Alexandria, also Bronze, and Arlington with Silver. Only 3 cities in the US have achieved the highest level of Platinum: the well-known bike meccas of Davis CA, Portland OR, and Boulder CO.
Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helped make this happen, either directly by working for the city, or indirectly by promoting the idea, and contributing to the energy of Roanoke’s bike scene. RIDE Solutions is definitely among that group, and they have the story, including a press release.
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Thanks for sharing this. We’re all pretty excited about getting the designation, and what this will do to spur further action on the part of city officials, advocacy groups, and individual enthusiasts.
One thing we have done is significantly grow Bike Month this year – http://www.bikeroanoke.com/events. Some of the events have already come and gone, like our first free tune up events. Working with volunteers from the local bike shops, we tuned-up 70 bikes at the Blacksburg Earth Day event on April 17th, and 40 bikes at Roanoke’s Bike Ready event on May 2nd. Many of those bikes were moldering in basements or garages and are now road-ready. We also sponsored the showing of the Filmed by Bike short film collection at a local microcinema on April 18th, and will be sponsoring monthly movies into Bike Month 2011.
We’re working very hard to earn and improve our designation. Arlington better watch its back!