The Love to Ride Blog

2010 was a great year and 2011 is off to a good start as well.  Last year we ran 18 Challenges and so far this year we’ve run 12.

To date the latest participation figures are:

• 59,000 have people have participated in a Challenge programme from
• 2,500 organisations
• 18,000+ ‘non-cyclists’ have got back onto a bike for our Challenges
• 6,000+ of these ‘non-cyclist’ participants are cycling regularly each week three months after taking part in the Challenge

Below is the analysis from the post project surveys that are carried out after each Challenge:

Who's taking part?

On average 54% of participants are non and occasional cyclists – just the people we want to influence the behaviour of.

This pie chart shows the average breakdown of participants from 21 recent Challenges, based on their cycling behaviour before they took part in the Challenge

Behaviour change achieved

Analysis of the results of 21 Challenges has revealed the following.

On average:

• 37% of participants who were ‘non-cyclist’ before taking part in the Challenge are now cycling once a week or more often.
• 43% of ‘occasional cyclists’ are now cycling to work at least once a week.

A note about ‘non-cyclists’ and ‘occasional cyclists’

We define ‘non-cyclists’ as people who haven’t cycled in over a year or who have only cycled once or twice in the past 12 months before they took part in the Cycle Challenge.

We define ‘occasional cyclists’ as people who were cycling 1 – 3 times a month or about once a week before the Challenge.

Improving Results

The above results show that over the years as we’ve run more Challenges (and learned a thing or two in the process) we’re getting better results now than we were even in our highly successful UK pilot in Swindon back in 2008.

Looking forward to continuing to bring this successful programme to more towns and cities in the UK, Australia, Europe, North America and beyond!