Saskatoon Cycles January 2025 Newsletter
Winter BYXE Week 2025
Saskatoon Cycles will once again be working with the City of Saskatoon in 2025 to present BYXE Week (pronounced “bikes week”) celebrations. These annual events aim to promote and encourage cycling year-round by providing fun activities for everyone, whether they’re a seasoned veteran of cycling, a beginner, or just thinking about becoming a beginner. The goal is to help everyone make cycling a part of their commute, sport, or leisure habits. We’ve been fortunate enough to partner with the city in the past to deliver these festivities, and we’re looking forward to making 2025 the biggest and most fun season yet!
You’ll be able to find all the details on our Winter BYXE Week page, but some notable takeaways are here:
- Winter BYXE Week runs from February 15 – 23, 2025
- Winter Bike to Work Day is Thursday, February 20, 2025
- The Scavenger Hunt (all week)
- The BYXE Week Launch Slow Roll (with treats!)
- The Social Media Contest (all week)
- Lots of great prizes up for grabs
- and always more!
Save some dates and plan to participate in any way you can. For every person that gets involved, we spread more fun, become all the more visible, and amplify our collective desire for a safe, healthy city even more.
BYXE Weeks are an invitation from the City of Saskatoon to make cycling a part (or a bigger part) of your life. Let’s get out in the snow and show the community how it’s done!
Check out Winter BYXE Week info here!
Board Retreat
On January 4th, 2025, the Saskatoon Cycles board greeted the New Year with a strategy session retreat. It’s an annual tradition to sequester for a day so new board members can be brought up to speed on the organization’s processes and to get everyone helping out to plot our direction for the coming year.
Like every year, we have a lot going on, with big dreams and schemes. Some of the things we’re focusing on for 2025 in no particular order, include but are not limited to:
- Delivering the BYXE Weeks with the City of Saskatoon
- Providing another stellar season of our renowned Bike Valet
- Ongoing advocacy with the City of Saskatoon for ongoing improvements to people-powered infrastructure, and more of it, as per the SafeConnect initiative
- Continue development of safer cycling education programs like Keep Rolling and more
- Expansion of our bicycle delivery service Pedal Express
- Community Slow Rolls, at least once a month
To pull this off with only a volunteer board and a single 1/4 time employee would be impossible, but fortunately we have an incredible base of support. You, our membership, continue to make our work possible by volunteering hundreds of hours of service at the Bike Valet, donating financially throughout the year, and making yourselves heard (in writing or in person) at countless city procedures. We very much appreciate all that you do!
We are incredibly happy to be an active part of this community, and we want to make our 15th Anniversary year of existence a loud and powerful one!
Addendum: We have to add a shout out to this year’s retreat: we were catered by Chef Cesar Roblin (Tla Cuisine), and it was fantastic. Thank you, Cesar!
Outreach: U of S
In early January, we joined up with the U of S Office of Sustainability to offer information on winter cycling to students and staff on campus during Winter Welcome Week. It was an excellent opportunity to interact with university folk and learn about their transportation habits: did they cycle, did they cycle in winter, what barriers did they face, what opportunities existed for them, etc.
Unsurprisingly, of the people who spoke with us most owned a bike and would at least occasionally ride it to campus, whereas only a few people were year-round cyclists. What was interesting (and hopeful) was how many were interested in trying out winter riding when told of fairly straightforward steps to take to address common concerns, which were covered in our handout, the Winter Cycling Primer.
Our intention is to host a similar information table for all season cycling during the Fall Welcome Week on campus later in 2025. Watch for updates!
We Don’t Forget
Family of Darin Kinniewess were disappointed when the “spirit bike” put up in his memory disappeared last year at the corner of Avenue P South and 19th Street West. Thanks to some conversations with the family and some quick volunteer work, a replacement memorial has been installed.
We feel it is important to honour losses like these in our city, and to offer families a place of reverence and reflection. Our collective goal, always, is to never have to paint and place another bike.
Cycling 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 a replacement calling an ambulance or the police, of course; 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.
Donate
Your donations give us the resources to press toward a Saskatoon where cycling is a viable, year-round mode of transportation that is safe, convenient, and comfortable for all ages.
We want families to be able to simply hop on their bikes to go grab an ice cream and enjoy the beauty of Saskatoon. For you or your partner to pick up groceries or a library book. And we really want you to be able to commute to work and back safely and conveniently.
Your donation helps us work on these three ‘pillars’ of cycling development for Saskatoon:
- Infrastructure – A safe, convenient, comfortable, and well-maintained cycling network throughout the city that allows cyclists to go from every neighbourhood to key destinations.
- Ridership – Educate, encourage, and promote cycling so more people choose bicycles as a convenient and safe transportation option year round.
- Culture – Educate, encourage, and promote diversity in ridership with respectful inclusion of all modes of transportation.