The Love to Ride Blog

Now more than ever, we need to make the most of our budgets.

Funding for active transportation has almost always been limited, but now there is an increasing need to make the best use of available budgets.

There are three key ways in which Love to Ride helps you to get the most out of your budget:

1) Excellent Value for Money

• Because the cost of the Love to Ride program is split amongst all the government entities and businesses which buy into Love to Ride, you are only paying for a fraction of the cost of developing and implementing a best practice program.

• We save you time and money - there’s no need to re-invent the wheel - we’ve developed and refined a program over the last decade that’s works. We efficiently localize the Love to Ride platform and program for your community and we focus everyone’s energy on a successful roll-out.

• We provide everything you need for success - from marketing materials to email campaigns to prizes to evaluation reports.

• It is a much better use of your budget to not waste time and money re-inventing the wheel, and instead buy-in a national, scalable program that is then localized for your area and existing initiatives.

• Our Cost per Result analysis shows how cost-effective our approach is. 

2) Have the biggest impact with your infrastructure budgets

We provide the data, feedback and insights from your community to enable you to identify which areas of your network are most in need of improvement. We provide data on what routes people are taking to get around by bike, and which parts of your network people find most unsafe, where people have had bike crashes and near misses.

You get the data you need to:

1. 1. Make decisions with confidence on where to invest your limited infrastructure dollars. 

   2. Make the business case for investment in a project - to elected officials, the public, local businesses, etc.

   3. Evaluate the impact that a project has had on improving the safety, comfort and usability of your network.

3) Get the Return on Investment (ROI) you need on your existing infrastructure investment

It’s essential that we get people using the bike infrastructure that has already been built.

If you build it, they don’t always come. There are other barriers to riding a bike than just the lack of infrastructure. 

As well as building the physical infrastructure on the streets, we also need to build the psychological infrastructure in people’s minds. That’s where proven behaviour change approaches like Love to Ride come in and help you to get people using your infrastructure.

We’re less likely to get the funding to complete our biking networks if we don’t first get people using the existing bike infrastructure and showing strong demand for more bike infrastructure.

4) Achieve multiple goals with 1 program.

Including:

1. 1. Getting more people riding bikes for transportation and using your bike infrastructure

   2. Cleaner air

   3. Saving your community money

   4. Road safety education

   5. Road safety data

   6. Data collection, analysis and evaluation

   7. Healthier, happier people in your community. Lower healthcare costs.

   8. Improving the livability of your community

Interested in learning more about how we can support you and your work? We'd love to hear from you.