Cascade Bicycle Club’s annual Commute Challenge has been a great and simple web tool to help motivate people to develop a habit of biking to work. People can organize commute teams at their workplaces to encourage people to give bike commuting a try and to motivate team members to keep it up all May. Because once you get in the habit of biking to work, you won’t want to get to work any other way.
But there’s one glaring problem: It leaves out the estimated 80 percent of bike trips that are not commute trips. And what about people who are unemployed or full-time parents? Could the challenge also be used to encourage people to bike to grocery store or to the park?
Well, that’s what Cascade Bicycle Club is hoping for. The Bike Month Commute Challenge is now simply the Bike Month Challenge.
You can form a team, inviting people who are interested in biking but could use some extra encouragement (if you want help being a good team captain, Cascade has some resources for you). Tracking bike trips and miles on the Challenge website is also a powerful way to see how far you go just by biking to get around town.
Last year, 16,000 people tracked 250,000 trips during the Challenge. Cascade wants to hit 300,000 trips this year.
The Bike Month Challenge is Cascade Bicycle Club’s annual fun, free online trip-tracking contest. Ride solo or form a team of coworkers or friends and challenge yourself and others to ride as much as possible during the month of May. Earn bragging rights and prizes for your bike trips and inspire a friend to try biking. All participants are eligible for a free souvenir and prizes, and team captains get a free T-shirt and party at the Captains Bash. New this year: You can track all your bike trips on our sleek new website, whether you’re riding to work, to coffee or just for fun.
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2 responses to “Cascade revamps Bike Month Challenge, now includes non-commute trips”
Tom, I think when you say “full-time parents” you actually mean “stay-at-home parents” since no working parent would characterize themselves as only a “part-time” parent.
I’m super excited about the new tracking tool and website. Our work has incorporated the additional non-commute trips into our team challenge, so it’ll be really cool to see how many additional trips are tracked this year. One really cool feature is that the new website includes a dashboard that tracks your total miles, CO2 avoided, and estimated calories burned. Yes, it’s all estimated, but still, a cool way to see your impact!