By teaching the necessary skills to ride with traffic and avoid accidents, the Collective hopes to increase safety for existing bicyclists and encourage more people to go by bicycle. This project involves hosting seminars to train instructors, hiring staff to organize, advertise, and teach the courses, and creating educational resources in print and website media.

Bike Ed is a collection of course curriculums developed by the League of American Bicyclists (LAB), more info can be found at www.bikeleague.org. The LAB has developed courses that teach basic and advanced safety skills to children, their parents, adult recreational bicyclists, and commuters. LAB's proven curricula will allow us to offer consistent, accurate information that has been designed to meet the basic safety needs of all cyclists. Courses are currently free, thanks to a 2-year sponsorship by the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT).

These courses educate riders to traffic law, strategies for dealing with traffic, how to make one’s self visible, avoidance of road hazards, and use of safety equipment. This instruction would operate in many of the same ways as motorcycle safety education, which has greatly reduced the amount of accidents and fatalities of motorcycle riders. A ten-year evaluation of the California Motorcyclist Training program performed in the 1990’s found that motorcycle crashes were reduced by 72 percent by the presence of the training. Furthermore the study found that riders who did not take the safety training were more than twice as likely to be involved in a crash as those who did (Billheimer, 1998). This is a strong argument for the value of education.

The principal goal of this project is to increase bicycle safety in Utah by giving cyclists the skills they need to ride safely on our city streets. If bicyclists have been educated in safety and risk management they are more likely to view cycling as a practical transportation option. We aim to offer safety education to all socioeconomic strata in Salt Lake, including our city’s financially disadvantaged populations. The Collective would like to be an instrumental part of an overall community effort to ensure the safety of Utah’s cyclists.

The Collective hopes to act as a catalyst to create other organizations and schools in Utah to offer safe-cycling classes. More safe cycling projects will give more Utah cyclists the opportunity to attend a class that is convenient and affordable for them. While more difficult to measure, an
overall community effort to increase the number of bicyclists and decrease bicycling injuries will be evaluated. The Collective hopes that creating an educated and aware cycling community, in conjunction with share-the-road campaigns of other organizations, will decrease the incidence of cycling injuries and fatalities.

Outcome Objectives: