Contributed by Choose Your Way Bellevue Guest Blogger: Hayley Richardson, TransManage
Earlier this month I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Ottawa, the tidy, exceedingly pleasant capitol city of Canada. I had been invited to give a talk at the annual membership meeting for Citizens for Safe Cycling—an advocacy organization that’s been working for the past 30 years to improve the city’s cycling environment. I also came with the fervent intention to ride, to share ideas, and to determine whether my experiences in the social media realm offered anything useful to their relentless quest to fashion the bicycle into a primary mode of transport.
Energy levels in the Ottawa cycling community were high. The mayor had just announced that 24 million would be spent over the next several years to improve cycling infrastructure, and riders of all stripes had been rejoicing in the segregated bike lane that has graced Laurier Street in downtown Ottawa since the summer. This marked contrast to much of the heated rhetoric surrounding transportation modes in our region. There was no palpable sense of animosity between cyclists and the community at-large and many of the elected officials in the metro area are expressly bike-friendly.
And yet challenges remain. Ottawa is a classic North American city, blessed (or cursed) with an abundance of open space, and subsequently built with the automobile in mind. Ottawa’s bicycle mode-split is holding steady at around 2%, and there is a wide gap between the number of male and female cyclists. Many continue to view cycling as “recreation” and the primary iterations of athletic attire showed it. Wherever I went the question on was: “How do we get a new generation of people interested in cycling—so that it’s seen as something cool and fresh, but also incredibly normal at the same time?”
With this in mind I chose to focus my presentation on “telling bicycle stories,” and discussed the various ways in which to use social media to effectively promote cycling to new audiences and generate excitement, build alliances, and sweeten the real-life ride.
I have found social media to be an invaluable tool to help tell the stories of people who choose the bicycle as a way to get around, and to portray cyclists in all their various incarnations—from glamorous to earnest to hale and hearty. Facebook is a dream for sharing clever transportation memes, exchanging luscious photos, and offering moral support and tips to newbie cyclists. It makes it simple to organize events like “Tweet Rides,” “Bike Polo,” and “Heels on Wheels,” increasing the appeal and fun factor of cycling to disparate audiences. It’s extraordinarily easy to form online relationships through social media—all it takes is a few likes—thereby rendering it more likely that non-cycling groups will help spread your information.
Ultimately social media has the ability to so beautifully demonstrate what could be, thereby allowing organizations to break out of the eggshell of preaching to the converted, and opening up a world of imaginative possibilities.
However, I felt it important to point out that the alluring, but sometimes unrealistic, realm of social media is not one to be inhabited exclusively. There is no substitute for actual civic engagement and rolling up your sleeves to lobby for infrastructure improvements that would make it easier to ride your bike.
Ottawa is an example of an extraordinarily liveable place that is making deliberate strides to increase mobility for all its citizens. Adding social media efforts should not replace any of these ground up efforts, only augment them. With a little more sparkle, creativity and online engagement, I predict they could easily catapult to the top of the list of the most bike-friendly cities on the continent; the dedication I saw from people in the cycling community was that apparent.
Thanks again, Safe Cycling Ottawa, for the amazing opportunity, and best of luck with your organizing efforts!
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