What with The Terminator himself recently going for a spin in Edinburgh, the cycling stars seem aligned for cycling success in the Scottish capital. We are delighted to be returning to the city to get more people riding bikes. We helped deliver the successful Better Way to Work programme back in 2010-11, under our previous name, Challenge for Change. Since then, we have launched as Love to Ride, a global online platform that combines behaviour change and gamification to get more people riding. Through our Workplace Cycle Challenge model we have delivered 150 projects on three continents, engaging 169,000 people.
The Edinburgh Cycle Challenge will run from 1-21 March and is completely free to all organisations and individuals in the city. The Challenge is a bespoke behaviour change project to get more people cycling, led by Love to Ride who are working in partnership with the Council, Grontmij and The Bike Station. The Challenge was announced at a well-attended stakeholder meeting at the Council in mid-January with representatives from the city’s vibrant cycling scene – including the CTC, SPOKES, Edinburgh Festival of Cycling, Sustrans and Hart’s Cyclery – and from the Council, SESTrans and several large employers.
The Edinburgh Cycle Challenge is an inclusive, fun, free competition between organisations to see which can get the highest proportion of their staff to try riding a bike. The website is designed to appeal to regular cyclists and people new to riding. There are integrations with popular apps like Strava, Moves and MapMyRide so regular riders’ activity can be automatically uploaded to their profiles. New riders can access tips, advice and information on where to ride and Dr Bike and skills training events and are able to create goals to help them track their progress.
The Challenge model incentivises new riders to join in and existing riders to encourage their colleagues: there are a hundred cinema tickets up for grabs which will be awarded to people who ride for the first time in a year and to those who encourage them to take part. There are also lots of great prizes to encourage everyone to join in, whether they ride every day or haven’t been on a bike in years.
Over the coming weeks there will be more organisations signing up and more prizes added to the website. It only takes a minute to sign up and join or register your workplace: www.lovetoride.net/edinburgh.
Claire Connachan, the Challenge Manager, would love to hear from anyone who has any questions about the Challenge, would like to sponsor a prize or wants to help out in any other way. Please drop her a line at claire.c@lovetoride.org
