National Bike Summit opens in Washington DC

This year's National Bike Summit kicked off today in Washington, DC.

This year we again have the largest delegation ever from Missouri, with somewhere over a dozen of us here for the Summit. After a day and a half of conference meetings Tuesday and Wednesday, we'll visit every member of Missouri's congressional delegation Thursday.

Copenhagen
The Summit's opening session featured the bicycle coordinator from the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. He reported they now have 36% of their work or school commutes by bicycle. It's the top mode share, with mass transit and driving each at about 33%.

In Copenhagen, 60% of residents report bicycling as their primary mode of transportation.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't always so. Immediately after World War II, the mode share of bicycling in Copenhagen was even higher than it is now.

But over the next 2-3 decades, the amount of bicycling steadily decline. It reached it's lowest point right around the mid 1970s.

Denmark took the oil crisis of the 1970s as a wake-up call--in promoting bicycling as in many other ways.

The result is about 4 times more bicycle trips (expressed as a percentage of all trips) in Copenhagen today compared with the 1970s. The rise in the number of bicycle trips has been quite steady since the 1970s, as they built more and better infrastructure to support bicycling.

Congressman Oberstar
Congressman Oberstar of Minnesota--an avid cyclist who is also chair of the House Transportation Committee--spoke at length.

The renewal of the federal transportation bill is coming up, as it does every six years.

Oberstar indicated that with the changes in Washington, and support building for making real progress on issues like climate change, and with an avid bicyclist running the House Transportation Committee, he predicts we will be looking at a very different Transportation bill this time around.

They are looking at integrating support for walking and bicycling far more deeply into the nation's transportation planning and spending--working to make the same kind of change in the U.S that Copenhagen was able to achieve since the 1970s.

Read more about this year's National Bike Summit at the Bike Portland web site.