Cycle September – the main event of our Year of the Bike – kicked off last Friday. As of Monday 4 September, we’ve already had 7,000 people log a ride – a phenomenal start that puts us well on track to meet (or beat!) our previous results (we’ve averaged 18,500 participants in the National Cycle Challenge over the last two years).
This year, as well as the name change, we’re inviting everyone to log their rides with Ride Report, a new app that automagically records your rides by running in the background on your phone – you don’t even have to press start or stop! This gives us great data to help local authorities plan better infrastructure, plus we get a much more realistic picture of real transport cycling behaviour because it picks up every short journey, unlike other apps. To encourage people to use Ride Report, we’re giving away £500 to spend on a new bike to one lucky winner who downloads the app and uses it for Cycle September.
Also new this year is an Organisation Page feature that, for a small cost, allows organisations with multiple sites in the UK to join them up so they can work together to climb the leaderboard. If you’d like to find out more about this exciting opportunity to get your colleagues cycling nationwide, please write to sam@lovetoride.org
Once again we’ve got a mouth-watering prizes pot, and everyone who takes part will go into the draw for Raleigh bikes, a trip to Brighton or Berlin, top-notch cycling luggage from Carradice of Nelson, amazing T2 helmets from Torch and incredible, innovative locks from Litelok (not to mention our global prize of a trip to Italy or San Francisco). There are lots of other prizes locally and nationally and we hope to break our record for prizewinners too – last year we gave away 877 prizes for riding and encouraging!
We’ll be unveiling local and national leaderboards later this week, so please register yourself and your workplace to start earning points now! It only takes a minute to register at lovetoride.net
Happy cycling!