Bicycle Friendly Community

Fort Collins, CO | Silver Level

Encouragement: To promote biking to work, the City established a Commuter Bicycle Coach Program in which participants receive special incentives for cycling at least one day a week for five months. To further encourage bicycle commuting, Fort Collins organized a program for area businesses to purchase bike lockers at reduced cost for the use of their employees. Fort Collins, with its well integrated on and off-street bicycle network, has a long history of deep and abiding commitment to bicycling. Future planning includes the development of additional facilities to enhance bicycle riding throughout the community. Local programs continually promote bicycle riding as alternative transportation to individuals, businesses, groups, and families on an on-going basis. The city has installed bike lockers for the public’s use in five primary places downtown, and provides bicycle parking for employees with bike parking at the library and utilities department. Local retailers wanting to install bike parking need only call the city’s Streets Department to have a free rack installed at their workplace.

Evaluation: With 4.4 percent of the local population riding bicycles, Fort Collins mode share ranks higher than the national average, and much of this is due to the city’s infrastructure of routes, lanes and trails. The city has a comprehensive Web site that provides information and links to numerous resources for bicycle safety, and Fort Collins’ bike map contains safety information and is available at all public facilities throughout the city. Recently, due to serious budget cuts in the city’s general fund, Fort Collins was faced with the elimination of the program which advocated for bicycling, pedestrian programs, transit, van-pool and car-pooling. The program was eliminated but the bicycle community successfully advocated for retention of a half-time bicycle coordinator housed in Transportation Planning, to assist the transportation planners, parks and trail planners, and others to continue to promote cycling in the community. Supportive council members picked up on the BFC award and other awards to argue successfully and turn a 4-3 vote against the bike coordinator into a 7-0 vote in favor. Since then, the Fort Collins Bikes Program was born.