BikeWalkNC

North Carolina’s advocate for safe cycling and walking

Advocacy

NC Year of the Trail

BikeWalk NC is proud to be partnering with The Great Trails State Coalition to promote and support 2023 as the “Year of the Trail” in North Carolina.

The Great Trails State Coalition is a group of  organizations, agencies and supporters advocating for the establishment of a Great Trails State Fund, with funding for all kinds of accessible trails, including natural surface and paved greenways.

The NC Year of the Trail will represent is the largest statewide celebration of trails and outdoor recreation in North Carolina history. Goals of the program are:

  • Inspire people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds to try trails,
  • Demonstrate the importance of trails to elected officials.
  • Boost outdoor recreation tourism across the state through Year of the Trail events in all 100 counties.
  • Promote safe and responsible use of trails, with the Outdoor NC Principles.
  • Advance diversity and inclusion on trails.

The Year of the Trail Toolkit is available for communities to learn how they can host and participate in events throughout the year.

Click to learn more about the coalition, or to become a member organization.

Safe Routes to School Grant Opportunities

North Carolina communities will soon be able to promote the importance of walking and bicycling to school, thanks to a federal grant program. 

Community organizations have until February 6 to apply for Safe Routes to School grant funding, the N.C. Department of Transportation announced.

“Communities can use the funds to develop creative programs that educate community members about safe driving, walking and biking practices near schools,” said Ryan Brumfield, director of the Integrated Mobility Division, the unit of NCDOT administering the grants. “This an important way to improve child safety and promote the healthy benefits of walking and biking.”

Visit 2023 Safe Routes to School – Non-Infrastructure – Project Application to apply for a grant.

Those eligible to apply for grants include local governments, regional transportation authorities and planning organizations, state agencies, school districts and schools, nonprofit organizations and tribal governments.

Proposals should be designed around a collaborative program that works to reduce the number of bicycle and pedestrian injuries and fatalities, and promotes safety through education, encouragement and evaluation. 

Safe Routes to School is a Federal Highway Administration program that encourages a healthy and active lifestyle by facilitating the planning, development and implementation of projects and activities that improve safety and reduce traffic, fuel consumption and air pollution near schools.

Additional information can be found at the NCDOT Connect website.

A Brief Look Back at 2022

2022 was an exciting and very busy year for BikeWalk NC. Through a generous grant from the Governor’s Highway Safety Program, we began to take our Friendly Driver Program across the state with the hire of our first Programs Manager, Trish Farnham. The program has been extremely well-received, and we will continue to offer it this year with our new Programs Manager, Laila Horton. We are also excited to add another staff member, our new Community Outreach Coordinator, Oliver Sendall.

We published our online Bicycle Safety Quiz and will be looking to have that translated into Spanish this year.

We offered LCI training as well as the Traffic Bicycling Workshop, held an incredible statewide NC BikeWalk Transportation Summit in Greenville, and helped the Town of Winterville secure a grant from AARP for a permanent Traffic Garden. 

We advised community advocates around the state on things to look for and request from NCDOT for various road-widening projects. 

We followed bills and came closer than in the past on two laws that we feel need to be changed. One is the law that restricts the use of state funds for standalone bicycle and pedestrian projects. Another is the contributory negligence law that can have serious consequences for vulnerable road users. Unfortunately, neither of these changes made it all the way through the session, but we will keep working for their passage. (BIkeWalk NC board member Ann Groninger recently wrote about a case involving a bicyclist that BikeLaw won for its client, but it highlights why the contributory negligence law is so bad, especially for vulnurable road users.)

We have lots more work to do in 2023. Won’t you join us in our quest to eliminate deaths on our roads?

NC BikeWalk Transportation Summit Recap

Maybe it’s because we were coming off of two years of virtual or semi-virtual Summits, but the energy at this year’s NC BikeWalk Transportation Summit was palpable. The entire local Summit committee was stoked and ready to welcome everyone to Greenville. The speakers and sessions were off the charts. The locally catered food was delicious, as was the beer at the local breweries.

The planning committee from Greenville, NC, along with the leadership of BikeWalk NC’s former Programs Manager, Trish Farnham, was phenomenal. It included Rosalie Calarco, Chad Carwein, Yolanda Davette, Eliud de Jesus, Dionne Evans, Debra Franklin, Anu Hanumanthu, Steven Hardy-Braz, Toneisha Jones, Alice Keene, Suzanne LaFollette-Black, Terry Lansdell, David Manning, Andrew Meeker, David Miller, Tony Parker, Sarah Parkins, Heidi Perov Perry, Mike Ross, Bion Schulken, Mary Schulken, Ted Silver, Carol Stein, Ellen Walston, Rachel Whitten, Larry Widman, Ben Wise, and Rich Zeck. BikeWalk NC thanks each of them for volunteering their time, expertise, and knowledge to the success of the event.

We could not put on the Summit without a grant from the Governor’s Highway Safety Program and the generosity of 40 sponsors. We highlighted each of our sponsors on social media prior to the summit. Please visit our Summit Page and scroll down to see all of them, and click on their icons to learn more about each.

Our speakers were inspiring and our presenters were well-informed, giving all of us so much to take home and adapt to our own communities. And, we were thrilled to help the town of Winterville secure a generous grant from AARP for a permanent Traffic Garden, and to walk them through the design and construction process. It felt good to see such a wonderful new recreation/education facility for young riders being left as a legacy of our Summit.

During the Summit, we encountered several technical issues with the live streaming and recordings that were out of our control. Some of the session recordings from the summit are available at BikeWalk NC’s YouTube channel. (While you are there, please subscribe to our channel so we you can be notified when new content appears.) Other sessions, unfortunately were recorded incorrectly by the IT group we hired for this purpose. Therefore, we are preparing pdfs of the slides for each presentation and post them on the site when they are ready.

Safer Roads for Us All: online presentation

“When you have a brain injury, you have to start over with everything…”
-Diamone Ricketts, artist and crash survivor

A person’s story can affect  us in a way that data and statistics never fully can.  

The Bicycle Friendly Driver Program was recently honored to partner with the Brain Injury Association of NC, the NC Department of Health and Human Services and others to present Safer Roads for Us All, featuring the stories of North Carolinians directly impacted by motor vehicle crashes.  

Ben Barry, Diamone Ricketts and Onnr Grogan honestly and powerfully shared through their personal stories how our behavior as motorists can forever impact other people.

The presentation’s recording is available here. We encourage you to watch it, share it with others, and most importantly, drive in a way that respects the experience of these presenters and so many other vulnerable road users.