The League of American Bicyclists is a bicycle advocacy and education organization that dates back (with a few interruptions) to 1880.
With revenue and expenditures of around $2 million, it is one of the most influential, if not the most influential organizations of its kind. What it has become best known for over the past decade or so is its Bicycle Friendly America program, which rates businesses, universities, and communities according to their level of bicycle-friendly engineering, education, encouragement, enforcement, and evaluation and planning (the 5 E’s).
There are five different levels for Bicycle Friendly Communities: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and diamond. Here is what the scorecard looks like:
There are currently 488 recognized Bicycle Friendly Communities, with at least one in every state. In Utah, Park City is the only community that currently has gold status, and I think anyone who has spent time bicycling in Park City would agree with such a distinction! Salt Lake City, Moab, Logan, Grand County, and Provo all have silver status (Provo is optimistic that it will be granted gold status in the upcoming application round). And Ogden, Riverdale, St. George, and Orem have bronze status. In addition, there are 31 bicycle friendly businesses in the state and three bicycle friendly universities (including nearby BYU, which has silver status).
The Hobble Creek Bicycle Association, with assistance from Springville City, recently submitted an application for Springville to be recognized as a Bicycle Friendly Community. We are shooting for bronze status with this first application, with the hopes of being able to move up to silver status in four years (cities must re-apply every four years). The application was long and detailed and took a significant amount of input from city officials to get it done, but it was very eye-opening to the kinds of things that the city and our associations could be doing to make Springville more bicycle friendly. And that is precisely the point of the program: to honor communities, of course, but also to give them ideas on how to improve.
As part of the application process, the League of American Bicyclists has asked us to distribute a survey to everyone to bikes in Springville, regardless of whether they live there or not. THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN!! Please use the following link to access and complete the survey and tell the League what Springville is doing well and how it can improve: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/app_BFC_Sp2020 .
Thanks!!