Saskatoon Cycles August 2024 Newsletter
Bike Valet: The Hits Keep Coming!
After successful stops at the first ever YXE Urban Games and WEGO, the 2024 Bike Valet season continues to rack up impressive bicycle numbers.
With August not yet finished, our amazing volunteers have given over 360 hours of their time and parked just under 3,000 bicycles so far this year!! And there’s so much more coming:
- Fireworks Festival – August 30-31, 2024
- Broadway Street Fair – Sept. 7, 2024
- Step Up for Mental Health Run – September 22, 2024
- Ride for Refuge – September 28, 2024
There are still a handful of volunteer spots open for all of these venues, and we’d love to have you join our team of friendly valets! If you haven’t done a shift before, you’ll get a shiny new volunteer shirt and a LOT of smiles from appreciative bike owners.
We salute the thousands of people who have chosen to ride their bikes to their event destinations this year, the fantastic venues who provide the Bike Valet to their patrons, and the hardworking and professional volunteers who supply the heart and soul to the operation. We are grateful for all of you!
We also greatly appreciate the City of Saskatoon for its support through the Environmental Grant.
4th Annual Cathy Watts Memorial Slow Roll – Sept. 8
From Cathy’s obituary, published Sept. 11, 2020:
“… The very first time I got on a bike it was like no other feeling. For a lot of my life cycling wasn’t much in style. Certainly not in winter. At some point I thought, ‘I need to change this!”
When I became co-chair of Saskatoon Cycles 10 years ago, I believed the city’s geography was perfect for year-round cycling. I dreamed we could become one of the best bike cities in the world. I was a happy agitator at city council, always trying to convince the people in charge that a bicycle is a simple solution to a complex problem.
… Now I am on another journey. If I go to heaven, I don’t intend to rest. I’ll be looking for bike lanes and if I don’t find any, there will be hell to pay.
So, if you are reading this, don’t be sad and certainly don’t send flowers. Here’s what I want you to do instead. Support my beloved Saskatoon Cycles, because there’s still a lot of work to do. Then get on a bike, head for a trail and feel what it’s like to be free.”
Almost four years later, it’s impossible to know what Cathy would think of the current cycling climate in Saskatoon. We’ve seen:
- recent tragedies
- a groundswell of public engagement on the issue of cycling safety
- understanding and support for a better, safer network of routes through the city
- sustained cycling education efforts with newcomer and community groups
- a series of wins in council to update and improve multiple pieces of infrastructure
- the launch of SafeConnect as a touchstone initiative to maintain focus on a baseline connected system
- some inspired relationship-building across the city
- the City of Saskatoon’s creation of the BYXE Street Team
- ongoing advocacy efforts like Tod Fox’s Ride for Your Life
We like to think Cathy would be fired up with the work we’re doing through community building and grassroots action, but of course, she’d have suggestions on how and where to do more!
Come and celebrate Cathy’s life and passion for activism on Sunday, September 8th and be a part of the discussion about where cycling advocacy is going in Saskatoon.
We’ll gather at D’Lish by Tish Cafe for a 2:30PM departure and tour some spots we think Cathy would like.
If you’re motivated by Cathy’s obituary, you can donate to Saskatoon Cycles in Cathy’s memory here.
LiveableYXE
When you’re advocating for better active transportation features to make your city safer, healthier, and greener, civic politics become incredibly important. In a perfect world, issues about health and safety would be completely apolitical, but democracy can be messy and not everyone shares the same views on “obvious” ideas.
LiveableYXE is a non-partisan initiative designed to inform voters about where candidates across the slate stand on issues that make Saskatoon a great place to be. The coalition has provided context for voters since the 2016 municipal election by sending a questionnaire to every candidate and posting answers on all kinds of issues.
There are no endorsements made; just candidate responses for the electorate to consider.
Saskatoon Cycles encourages all citizens to follow LiveableYXE on social media and/or check in periodically to their website to stay updated on where candidates stand.
We also encourage you to support the candidates you like with your time, money, and social capital; advocacy is much more effective when you’ve already developed relationships with your mayor and councilor!
Nuit Blance Glow Roll: Save the Date!
Details will be emerging in the weeks to come, but we’d like you to remember:
Saturday, September 28th, 2024
7PM – 12AM
as the night we celebrate the fourth running of the Nuit Blanche Glow Roll, where the cyclists become “part of the art”!
The Nuit Blanche organizers have grown more and more sophisticated in their route planning and prep with each successive year, making the bike ride the absolute BEST way to take in “Saskatoon’s Free All-Ages Night-Time Arts Festival”.
Plan to light up your ride and join the tour with us. Follow us on our social platforms for details.
Collecting Data
Here’s your friendly reminder of how vital it is for city planners and advocates to have robust data to help inform the discussion around cycling infrastructure and patterns around Saskatoon.
Some of the best data is information that indicates how much cycling is happening and where our bikes are taking us. You can pitch in by sharing your biking routes and experiences through a couple of apps that aggregates this data and keeps it anonymous.
1. Install Strava on your phone and track every ride or walk you take. You only need a free account. 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 to be 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. This is NOT instead of calling an ambulance or the police. Absolutely do that first if it’s needed!!
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.
