We’re rounding out the week enjoying this amazing weather! Thumbs up to milder temps, lots of great riding practice, great conversations and lessons, and most of all to all of our amazing students this week, including this afternoon’s crew of Earn-A-Computer graduates! Pictured standing proudly with their monitors, towers, keyboards, flash drives and related equipment, they are the 46th group of BWorks students to graduate from one of our free, multi-week education programs this calendar year.
We ask you to consider the current construction underway adding a bike trail along Tower Grove Avenue. Less than two miles of infrastructure is costing $18 million. Decision makers are obviously sinking a lot of public funds into this single segment of infrastructure. But are we investing in the people or the users? Or is it “build it and they will come”?
Within a block or two of the new Tower Grove Connector, we have five schools filled with kids — two public, two charter and one private. That’s over 1,300 kids in these five buildings, traveling back and forth to school twice a day. Multiply that by 170 school days a year, and that’s roughly over 400,000 trips each school year.
With this vibrant community of young people at five schools — and soon a dedicated trail passing through the neighborhood — what investment have we committed to making sure this new trail is filled daily with users equipped to make the most of it? What investment have we committed to ensure that the Connector dream’s goal of reducing travel by car is actually met?
A mere one percent of the Connector project’s budget, or $180,000, could fund numerous different encouragement and education programs such as (but not limited to) the following:
-School-based safe biking and walking programs
-School-based Earn-A-Bike courses
-Strider bike fleets and curriculum for Learn-To-Ride activities at school
-Crossing guards
-Tower Grove Park field-trip bikes, for school groups to ride to the park
-Bike/walk-to-school events
-Walking tours conducted by the botanical garden on green travel practices
-Retirement rides or walks to encourage our older residents to stay active and fit
BWorks is asking that the city embrace a rule/policy/regulation that creates a pot of funds equaling one percent, for programing and encouragement, in tandem with this and future bike/ped infrastructure investments.
This way, if a gym teacher wants to promote balance bike access and programming for our youngest residents along a trail, or if a neighborhood retirement center wants to encourage and educate older residents to walk or bike more, this pot of funding would be there to kickstart such investments.
At the end of the day, in this example, we are asking for the cost of just 95 total feet of this trail.
One hundred and two #STL-area kids joined us over the past week for a BWorks class! Adventures ranged from earning computers at our weeklong Divoll library camp with St. Louis Public Library, to power pedaling from Firm Foundation Tutoring to Tower Grove Park and back, to six different cohorts at our BWorks headquarters in Soulard, to neighborhood rides in Lake Saint Louis and Granite City. We capped off the final class of the week at Mr. Twist! Special thanks to Six Mile Regional Library District and the Agency for Community Transit for partnering with us on our first-ever Granite City pilot!
