BOULDER, CO (BRAIN)—The industry and bike advocates need research to back up their claims with federal and state lawmakers about the benefits of cycling and usage of roads that accommodate cyclists.
That’s why today and tomorrow Bikes Belong is hosting a meeting of 12 researchers from renown universities across the nation and one person from the Netherlands that are working on bicycling-related studies.
These researchers have devoted their time to studying the economic and health benefits of cycling, and dissected the air quality, road congestion and carbon offsets data in their reports.
“First we want to understand what leading bicycle researchers are studying right now,” said Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong. “We want to tell them what we need to help make the case for bike project funding. More than anything else, we’re going to listen and learn. We also want to help those researchers find funding to conduct their studies.”
Blumenthal said Bikes Belong plans to film the meeting and post link to the footage on the nonprofit’s Web site soon.
“Performance-based outcomes—that’s the big buzz. You hear it 100 times a day on C-SPAN,” Blumenthal said. “I heard that from Congressman Oberstar in Washington. We’re going to have to have good answers to, ‘If we invest additional money in bicycling, what’s going to happen?’ Not everything will be figured out by university based researchers, but some of it can.”
Blumenthal said that aside from hosting the meeting, Bikes Belong will take the group of 20 or so total attendees on a bike ride Friday afternoon to show them the bike facilities available in Boulder, Colorado.
–Lynette Carpiet
