Motion doesn't equal productivity

Do you sometimes confuse constant motion for productivity? I do. I’m comfortable when I feel busy. But my constant motion doesn't always translate into productivity. The same is true in the bike movement. We sure are busy attending city council meetings and organizing bike safety education programs. But is all that action resulting in more riders?To answer this question, we’re excited to announce a new collaboration to measure the progress of the bike movement in Santa Clara County. In partnership with the Mineta Transportation Institute San Jose State University, Santa Clara County Public Health and Change Research, SVBC has embarked on a project to measure public attitudes towards bicycling. The end goal is to understand current attitudes towards bicycling, attitude changes over time, barriers to bicycling and to understand that information along demographic lines.With this data we hope to evaluate whether bike advocacy areas of focus are resulting in real change. If for example, we find that people’s fear of bicycling remains static, we’ll need to re-evaluate our strategies for getting more people to ride.It is worth noting that this is new for SVBC and comes on the heels of several efforts of ours to use data to inform our policy and program approaches. For example, a few short years ago, SVBC partnered with Joint Venture Silicon Valley to publish the Bike Vision and importantly, to make sure information on bikes is collected in the annual Joint Venture Index report.We just signed the contract and are in survey design mode. What kinds of questions would you pose to the broader public in order to understand what we should be doing to get more folks riding? Email your ideas to ride@bikesiliconvalley.org. And expect to hear the results early 2020.