Random notes from the Bike Summit that the BTA attended March 1st through 3rd in Washington, DC:
- The BTA’s work from years ago is still being used. Our model Bike Safety Education Curriculum is being used from Georgia to Virginia to Hawaii, and versions of our 2000 TV Public Service Announcements are being run in South Carolina in a joint effort with Fox News and SC-DOT. No reinventing the bike wheel here!
- More biking organizations! More! Bike Houston is hiring an executive director, the Hawaii Bicycle League sent their two-week-old first employee Kristi Schulenberg (she had been there two weeks, she’s older than two weeks old!), and so forth.
- Very impressed that the Texas Bicycle Coalition owns an RV that they travel around the state with to teach bike safety and safe routes programs. Texas is more than four times as big as Oregon, so they put on some serious miles.
- Rails to Trails Conservancy is likely to host their annual conference in Portland in 2007. While Oregon hasn’t got all that many rails to trails projects because our rail network wasn’t hugely built out and most of it is still used, our trails work is impressive and biking will be shared with the country. As I worked across the hall from RTC in Washington DC for a summer, I’m thrilled these folks are coming and that we can learn from their conference.
- AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, will hold their annual conference in Portland in late October. AASHTO needs to continue to learn how to create facilities that serve all modes, and has made comendable progress over the past several years.
- People want to know how to become Oregon, how to become the BTA, and how to make it all work. We, of course, were quick to note various hurdles yet to be overcome, and that even if we’re a national leader, we’re far from being the international leader we want to be. And the BTA is smaller than the Texas Bicycle Coalition, Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, and, well, perhaps that’s it, even though we represent a much smaller population.
- Congressman David Wu says that he can’t afford a good bike, and that he’s afraid of having his bike stolen in Washington, DC… someone get on this, eh?
