Saskatoon Cycles April 2026 Newsletter
Hoorah! Spring BYXE Week 2026 Is Near!
Celebrate your cycling city!
Spring BYXE Week is just over the horizon, and we’re hoping the weather will have settled down enough to entice everyone out for some biking fun and exploration.
The Spring 2026 edition runs from Saturday, May 9th to Sunday, May 17th, so mark your calendars now!
In partnership with the City of Saskatoon, there will be a lot of activities lined up to get people of all ages and abilities out on their bikes enjoying the rich cycling culture of our city. We’ll have:
- A Slow Roll Kick-Off (with refreshments at the end) to launch the week (May 9)
- The legendary Tune-Up Tent, for quick bike adjustments (May 10)
- Bike to Work Day, the BYXE Week Crown Jewel, with LOTS of fun commuter stations (May 14)
- The 4th Annual Great Saskatoon Bike Passport Adventure (with a grand prize of $650 in gift cards from Outtabounds) (all week)
- Our ever-popular Scavenger Hunt (all week)
- The always fun Social Media Contest (all week)
- Prizes, prizes, prizes
Start gathering your friends, planning your routes, and dusting off your wheels, because this year is going to be HUGE!
CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE BYXE WEEK PAGE WITH ALL THE DETAILS!
Bike Valet 2026
The 2026 season of the Saskatoon Cycles Bike Valet will officially start on May 3rd!
We’ve been planning for months: events have been booked, a new supervisor hired, and equipment organized. The Bike Valet is ready to get to work!
We’re hoping to have a HUGE, fun season of parking thousands of bicycles at great Saskatoon festivals and events, but the final integral piece of the Bike Valet is YOU, our volunteers. By donating your time to this community-driven service, we can make the service free for cyclists and keep operational costs lower and more accessible to more venues. And that means more trips by bike, fewer cars on the road and in parking lots, and more convenience.
If you’ve volunteered for the Valet before, you know how much fun the shifts can be and how quickly they’re over. (It’s why we get so many people returning, year after year.) If you’ve never “worked” a Valet shift before, why not make 2026 your inaugural year? You’ll get a free t-shirt and guaranteed smiles of appreciation from patrons who like having their wheels watched over by people who care.
Our first venue of 2026 is coming up fast: Kaleidoscope 2026 (previously Art in the Park) is on Sunday, May 3rd from 1PM to 7PM. There are still spots open for volunteers, and this will be a fun venue to check out before or after your shift: kids’ art in a park, food trucks, and many other activities.
If you can’t make it to this venue, please visit our Bike Valet page and find an event and date that works for you. Signing up is easy, and you’ll be contributing a great service to the community.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE BIKE VALET SHIFT CALENDAR FOR 2026
Cycling Data: Show off Your Routes!
This is your reminder to connect with a couple of free apps that can help city planners and advocates get the robust data they need to promote and build better and safer cycling in Saskatoon.
Strava and BikeMaps.org are apps that aggregate crowdsourced information to help decision-makers understand transportation habits and patterns. The information collected is all anonymous, but can be extremely useful when accumulated and sorted on a city-wide scale. To help out, you can:
1. Install Strava on your phone and track every ride or walk you take. You only need the FREE version to do this. And if you already use a tracking app, check to see if it has a Strava integration. There are more than 100 apps that Strava connects with.
Strava anonymizes the data from all users in an area and creates the Strava heatmap. Images from these heatmaps can be a powerful visual to show that there are cyclists and walkers using the streets all over Saskatoon (like this presentation on Circle Drive on Ave C). But we need as many cyclists as possible using this system!
2. Bookmark Bikemaps.org and report every time you have a cycling crash, a near-miss, see a cycling hazard, or have your bike stolen. (NOTE: Please use Bikemaps.org AFTER you have contacted the appropriate emergency service for assistance.)
Bikemaps.org is a system that aims to catch as many as possible of the almost 70% of all cycling incidents or near misses that don’t get reported officially.
Donate
Saskatoon Cycles works year round to make the city a safer and more enjoyable place for everyone to get around on their bike.
You probably see some of that work, like the ubiquitous Bike Valet that parks thousands of bike a year at major events, or our faces and voices on the news talking about the latest council decisions.
You might not see some of our other work, though, like the Bike Bank and Keep Rolling programs that we’re building to make sure newcomers and equity-deserving folks have access to safe cycling training AND the equipment (bikes, bells, helmets, and locks) that they might need.
With every interaction, we’re strengthening existing community relationships and creating new connections, making sure that everyone wins when safe, accessible cycling is part of the societal fabric.
We regularly “punch above our weight,” getting the job done with budgets tighter than a well-tuned brake cable, so you can imagine how appreciated donations are. They keep our existing programs running smoothly and can also open up new possibilities.