Cycling for Stakeholders

Nijmegen structured post below-

For a stakeholder group, I choose people that commute to work. This is an important community to educate on transportation because there are many different methods people use to get to work every day. Some use cars, some use buses, others bike or walk. My entire life until last year I would always take the bus or drive my car to school and work. In high school, I drove to work even though I had a bike. If the infrastructure in Salem, OR was more geared towards bikes, maybe I would have chosen that mode of transport instead. Once I moved to Eugene I started to bike to work almost every day. Sometimes I do fall into the driving trap, especially on days when it is raining a lot or I am running late. However, driving doesn’t even save me that much time because I still have to search for and pay for parking.

In order to communicate with people who commute to work about a new cyclist project, I would tell them all the benefits of cycling to work. The first benefit I would share is how good cycling is for your health. If you bike every day, it’s an easy way to incorporate exercise into your daily routine. Another benefit is that you can save money. Once you own a bike, you don’t have to pay for bike parking like you do for cars. Bikes are a lot cheaper than cars too. You also don’t have to pay for gasoline.

I would also share that biking being challenging is a misconception. So many people on this trip have already biked over 200 miles, even when most of us wouldn’t self-identify as cyclists. Biking a few miles a day to work and back is much easier than people expect. Especially in towns that are more flat, like Nijmegen or Eugene. And for people who are concerned about the amount of physical exercise, there are always e-bikes too. I noticed many older people on e-bikes in Nijmegen. While they are more expensive than a normal road bike, they still cost less than a car.

Biking to work can also save you time, be a social activity if you bike with a co-worker and is better for the environment. You’re not releasing emissions from your bike, but you would from a car. A new cyclist project would also limit safety concerns. If there was a new project for a bike only lanes or bike bridges, it would make biking to work safer and easier to understand.