It was too nice to be inside more than necessary over the past week! Fortunately, our Earn-A-Bike, Learn-To-Ride and Earn-A-Computer classes and other activities had us rolling here and there and everywhere anyway. In some cases our teachers were able to bike to class, only to do even more biking with the kids upon arrival in a couple cases! Our mechanical team paused from their tireless work one afternoon to dream big about BWorks’ next chapter while others even pedaled downtown to attend local government meetings and make new friends! We also made progress on our #bikebus planning for the fall semester , and continued to prepare for our in-school education programs that kick off at five schools this coming month

Looking back on the past week, we’re feeling especially grateful for shade and water! Thanks to those good things and a dedicated crew of staff and volunteers, the heat didn’t keep us from running Learn-To-Ride, Earn-A-Computer and Earn-A-Bike class sessions in locations ranging from U. City to Soulard to Granite City. We also had 26 riders of all ages join our 11-mile alumni adventure Saturday in Edwardsville, where we stopped at the downtown criterium event partway through the event.

We’ve got more alumni adventures in the works along with more fall class listings coming soon, so stay tuned!

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.