The Love to Ride Blog

If you're working in transportation, there's a good chance you're being asked to do more with less.

Your goals haven't gone away. You still want to get more people walking and biking, improve road safety, reduce car trips, engage your community, and make your transportation network work better for everyone.

But budgets are tight, staff are stretched, and every dollar needs to deliver results.

So here's a question worth asking: Why spend valuable time and money developing a new program when you could use one that's already been developed, tested, refined, and proven to work?

1. Why reinvent the wheel?

Imagine you're planning a campaign to encourage more people to ride bikes.

You could commission an agency to design a campaign from scratch. You'll need to develop the campaign concept, messaging, creative materials, website, participant communications, incentive structure, evaluation methodology, and reporting.

Then you'll need to test whether it all works.

That's a lot of time and money before you've even encouraged someone to hop on a bike!

At Love to Ride, we've spent more than a decade developing, testing, refining, and continually improving our behavior change programs.

Our approach has been used in more than 250 cities and regions across 14 countries.

We've learned what motivates people to give biking a try, what barriers prevent them from riding, how to engage workplaces and communities, and how to support people to make lasting changes to their transportation habits.

And we haven't stopped improving.

We've built the wheel. We've tested it. We keep making it better. And we can adapt it and localize it to your community.

That means you can focus more of your time and resources on what matters most: getting people involved and achieving results.

2. Get three campaigns for a fraction of the cost of creating one

Here's where the economics get interesting.

Rather than every city paying separately to develop its own program, Love to Ride spreads the cost of developing and improving our campaigns, communications, technology and tools across the cities, regions, and organizations we work with around the world.

It's a shared platform with shared development costs, but locally tailored programs.

And when we develop improvements with one city, other cities benefit too. Everyone gains from our ongoing innovation, without having to fund all that development themselves.

This means you can access a level of program, technology, expertise, and evaluation that would be prohibitively expensive to develop independently.

Instead of commissioning one bespoke campaign, your budget could deliver three seasonal campaigns throughout the year, potentially for a fraction of the cost of developing and delivering a comparable campaign from scratch.

And you're getting much more than just the campaigns.

3. Everything you need, ready to roll

We know transportation professionals have plenty to do already.

That's why we've designed Love to Ride to make running effective programs as easy and cost-efficient as possible.

Depending on your program, we provide:

• Proven campaigns and challenges: Engaging campaigns designed using behavior change principles and refined through years of experience.
• Marketing and promotional materials: Posters, social media content, email templates, digital graphics, and ready-to-use messaging.
• Participant communications: Targeted emails, practical advice, encouragement, and support based on participants' experience, motivations, and barriers.
• Prizes and incentives: Tried-and-tested incentive approaches, prize management, and engaging challenges.
• A community and workplace engagement platform: Tools that help people encourage their colleagues, friends, and family to get involved.
• Surveys and evaluation: Baseline and follow-up surveys, analysis, and reporting to measure participation and changes in behavior.
• Transportation data and insights: Useful information about riding patterns, barriers, route comfort, and road safety.
• Expert support: Guidance from people who specialize in designing and delivering transportation behavior change programs.

Rather than spending months creating these elements individually, your team can concentrate on local outreach, partnerships, and engaging your community.

After all, the goal isn't to create a great-looking campaign. It's to create measurable change.

The bottom line: More impact. Less work. Better value.

With Love to Ride, you're getting much more than a simple bike challenge or Bike Month activity. You're getting a proven program and platform that can support multiple goals, from workplace and school engagement to mode shift, road safety, public health, and sustainability.

You’re saving yourself time and money and getting a program that’s proven to achieve mode shift and get more people riding.

You're also getting useful transportation data and community feedback to help you make smarter infrastructure investments and get more value from the infrastructure you've already built.

And because we share the costs of developing and continually improving our platform across our partners worldwide, we can provide all this at a fraction of what it would cost to build a comparable solution from scratch.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, let's keep improving it together.

Want to see how much more you could achieve with your existing budget?

We'd love to hear about your goals, your challenges, and what you're working to achieve. We can show you how Love to Ride can support your work, with program options tailored to your needs and available budget.

We can also show you how the program is localized to your area and promotes your other work and initiatives to a new audience to increase engagement in your existing programs.

Explore how Love to Ride delivers value or drop us an email at hello@lovetoride.net.

Let's get more people riding and smiling! 🚲