Bike Project: Making Bicycles Work in an Urban Setting

Paula Johanson

The genesis of the “Bike Project” was a panel discussion on “Green Futures: not the Soylent Green variety” at V-Con 34 conference in Vancouver, October 2009. An audience member addressed the panel to general applause: “We already know how to recycle and make our own choices to live greener,” he said. “What we want is to know how we — the hundred people in this room — can fix the things that other people, corporations and government, are doing wrong, and help them do the right thing.”

The “Bike Project” is a response to this mandate, collecting resource material into a format accessible to ordinary readers. This resource material will have information intended to empower people to make their communities places where bicycles can and will be used. Readers will know how other people have succeeded in increasing bicycle usage and safety, making bike lanes and bike paths, building mountain bike tracks and velodromes and skateparks, and operating shared bike programs. This project is not an exhaustive encyclopedia; it will be a pocket toolkit to get readers started on their own projects without re-inventing the wheel. The “Bike Project” was awarded a Community Researcher Fellowship at UVic for 2011.