50K! Holy Cow!
In less than a year, on a shoestring budget with three full-time and two part-time team members, we’ve reached 50,000 miles ridden with the Bike Streets app on Denver streets.
If you told us a year ago we’d be here, we’d have been astonished. But no complacency, dear friends, we have a long way to go. So what follows is a candid look at the road ahead and where we need to improve.
1. Make it easier for people who already ride to get their bike curious friends to ride. This is the essence of what we’re trying to do: make it possible for anyone to ride to any destination. It’s why we created Friends and will continue to refine it.
2. Make it clearer why our Turn-by-Turn routes use quiet neighborhood streets that are sometimes one street over from arterial streets that have painted bike lanes. (The reason being that most people don’t consider the latter to be comfortable places to ride.)
3. Get more people who sign up for the app to take their first ride. It’s a big step to go from downloading an app to doing something in the real world. (This ain’t as simple as swipe left, swipe right.)
4. Make it clearer to folks why there is a paid version and that saving one tank of gas in a year because you’ve ridden your bike so much pays for the membership. (Not to mention the health and happiness returns on your investment.)
5. Convert the impressive statistics you’ve put up on the dashboard into policy and infrastructure wins: demonstration projects on the streets and progress on VAMOS, our vision of a connected network of Shared Streets that the Mayor and many City Councilors made part of their campaigns.
6. Add Lakewood to the Denver map (and eventually the other adjacent communities) and make the platform available for groups in other cities to build and deploy their own maps and apps. This will make it possible for us to invest even more in the work.
Thank you for helping us get this far – the equivalent of more than two trips around planet Earth! – and identify these lessons and more. Let’s get after it.
Enjoy your next ride.