Bicycle Network: Take Action

Here are some ways that you can make a difference by speaking up:

1. Invite someone to come riding with you, offer to find a bike for them, go with them when they are looking at bikes, offer to find a good way for them to ride into work and then go with them until they get comfortable. Here is a link to help you get other people into commuting.
2. Ask the boss at work to put on a breakfast on ride to work day. Ask the boss to install or upgrade the bike parking, lockers and showers. If you would like some support to do that you could help set up a workplace BUG.
3. Write to your local paper. When you see the council doing something good for bikes, write in a positive letter. That'll surprise everyone! If an discussion starts in the paper or in social media, have your say. Keep it positive. Negative letters won't change anyone's mind but they could make the spectators think that bike riders are unreasonable. On the other hand positive letters have the opposite effect.
4. Write to the metro papers - again we encourage you to concentrate on how bikes provide a solution to a problem and that they are a good value investment. Here is how we did it one time.

In general we find that most people are positive about bike riding. Many people who don't ride would like to but are uncomfortable riding in traffic.

The City of Sydney has set up a site to help build support for their push on bike riding. The categories are a good summary of the benefits of investment in bicycle infrastructure and the pages have some good facts that you could feed into your letter. There is a newsletter that you can subscribe to as well as a Facebook page. Click the images to go to the sites.