Descrição

The core promise of bike share is increased mobility and freedom, helping people to get more easily to the places they want to go. To meet this promise, and to make sure that bike share’s benefits are equitably offered to people of all incomes, races, and demographics, public engagement must be at the fore of bike share advocacy, planning, implementation, and operations. Cities, advocates, community groups, and operators must work together to engage with their communities—repeatedly, strategically, honestly, and openly—to ensure that bike share provides a reliable, accessible mobility option that is as vibrant as the communities it serves.
Creating an equitable bike share system is not just one action. Rather, equitable bike share is built from a collection of policy choices and funding decisions: system design, membership options, marketing, and operational practices. Making the right choices requires practitioners to actively look for opportunities to connect with people. As a result, cities, advocates, and operators must invest in engagement, hiring people who can connect in communities in respectful and meaningful ways. Engagement work should take many forms to reach people in ways that are clear, convenient, and accessible to them.
Finally, the role of cities and bike share planners is to gather information about the public’s transportation needs and desires, and to synthesize it, teasing out patterns and themes that resonate both for individuals and for the public as a whole. No engagement process will reach everyone, but cities, advocates, and operators must be cognizant at all times of the impact of systematic race-, ethnicity-, income-, and gender-based disenfranchisement on public decision making. To combat these historic inequities, planners must strive to “oversample” in key communities to ensure that everyone’s needs are truly met.
Strategies for Engaging Community is a tool to guide cities, community and civic groups, advocates, and bike share operators in developing programming to actualize community-oriented mobility goals. It identifies key goals for engagement, strategies that can be employed to meet those goals, and examples of specific actions or programs that cities, advocates, and operators can undertake. Many programs or actions can support multiple goals and strategies. This document reflects the leading practices and strategies as compiled by cities, community groups, advocates, and operators across the U.S. and Canada.