Sep 012023

Riding Down Memory Lane: September

Back to school month, so it’s time to organize a bike bus if you have school-aged kids. If you don’t have school-aged kids you can just celebrate the beautiful riding of early fall, with some crisp mornings and sunny days. For me fall always feels like the real new year: the time of year when I want to undertake new projects, maybe buy some new pens and notebook paper.

Reminder of September Bike Events

Sept. 22, World Car-Free Day: Know what really sets you free? A bicycle!

, Autumn Edition: The original organizers don’t always promote this, but 30 days hath September, as the rhyme goes. (Some of you use this one weird knuckle counting trick to work out how many days in a particular month. I use the poem.)

National Bike Challenge continues.

Civic action season: Whether or not you bike to school, take a look at whether your community truly offers safe routes to school for children walking or rolling. If not, this is a good time of year to contact elected officials and city staff (who are the ones responsible for the speed limits and street designs, not your school district, although by all means get the school board and administration lined up in support of safety improvements) and ask for change. Also a good time of year to invite a state legislator or two and other to experience those school zones personally during parent drop-off/pick-up time (maybe as part of #WeekWithoutDriving; start planning now for the national event Oct. 2-8). Encourage them to support infrastructure investments to shift more kids to active transportation and reduce some of the vehicular traffic during peak travel times.

Riding Down Memory Lane: Posts from Septembers Past

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Reader Comments

  1. Great question about the kits. The program has to follow what the legislature laid out in the budget proviso establishing the programs and it lists e-bikes/trikes, not the kits. In our program design we’ll identify questions like this that they may decide to address in future updates to their directive.
    We wrote a blog post with answers to some of the questions we’ve already gotten https://wsdotblog.blogspot.com/2023/08/hold-onto-your-handlebars-well-soon.html). Doing that generated more questions and we’ll get an FAQ page set up. The kit question will go on that.

  2. I was delighted to see the State is getting behind bikes as a better travel mode. Will the new program I saw in the Seattle Times include subsidies for bike conversion kits as well as the ebikes themselves? Kits are much less expensive, so the $ would go further if those receiving the subsidies could get a kit to put on a bike they already own and love instead of having to get a new bike and get rid of the old one.

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