Mark Your Calendars, Buy Your Tickets: The California Bike Summit Is Coming in October

Every two years, the California Bicycle Coalition convenes a summit to talk about how we are making our communities better places for bicycling, and how we can do even more. This year the summit will be held in downtown Los Angeles, within walking distance of Union Station, October 15-17, 2019.

The summit will include three days of talks, biking and walking tours, workshops, discussions, and many opportunities to meet and talk about and promote the importance, beauty, and benefits of biking.

The calendar of events has not yet been finalized, but for sure it will include two full and one half days of workshops, with three plenary sessions. Those will include:

• The heads of Departments of Transportation of major cities talking about the challenges and opportunities they face in creating better bike networks. Seleta Reynolds of LADOT and Ryan Russo of OakDOT have been invited–but not yet confirmed–and other city DOTs will also be represented.
• Streetsblog’s Sahra Sulaiman will moderate a discussion about the expansion of the South Central biking community over the last several years. Featuring club founders from subsets of the cycling community not often heard from in advocacy circles, the session will tell the story of how they came to reclaim the community’s contested and often hostile streets and used their bikes as tools with which to build community pride, youth self-esteem, a sense of family, and a spirit of giving back.
• New and shared mobility–scooters, bike-share–and what it means for the future of urban transportation and in particular for bicycling. Representatives of scooter and bike-share companies will join researchers in the field to discuss where these new options are headed.

In addition to the three plenaries, there will be breakout sessions on topics as diverse as the Active Transportation Program, biking and aging, new attempts to regulate traffic speeds, combining bikes and transit, Caltrans district bike plans, responding to backlash against new bike infrastructure, building an advocacy organization, and more.

The theme of the summit is intersections. That covers physical–those difficult-to-design areas that can be hotspots for injuries–as well as theoretical: the intersections of bicycling advocacy with other forms of mobility, race and class and transportation injustice, housing and land use.

Check here for more information and to register.

CalBike is also able to offer free and discounted scholarships to people who cannot afford a full price ticket–but don’t wait to apply for those.