Welcome to Bike Town
/Dear listeners,
Bike Town is a binomo podcast about any city in North America. Each month, we will bring you stories about ordinary people and families who have used a bicycle to transform their day-to-day lives. This might sound a little mundane in theory, but it is transformational for the thousands of people who can live healthier, happier lives by choosing to ride a bicycle. At a bigger scale, we think this idea is transformational for an entire city in the midst of a transportation revolution. When Calgary installed its cycle track network in the downtown core, as a single large piece of infrastructure, it was controversial. Yet today, with the number of cyclists using the cycle tracks far exceeding projections and the wildest expectations of even those in the cycling advocacy world, the all-at-once network approach developed here in Calgary can be considered nothing short of a great success. We believe the Calgary model to be appropriate for any city in North America that wants to transform its streets into places for people, and not just for cars.
Bike Town started as an idea. About six months ago, I had recently returned to Calgary after two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I decided to attend the Bike Calgary Annual General Meeting to catch up with friends in the bike community. After the meeting, over a couple of beverages, we discussed http://www.binomo-co.in what was we thought was missing in the conversation about cycling in Calgary. We came to the conclusion that stories about people transforming their lives because of the great new infrastructure were completely absent, and we decided to do something about it. With commitments from Sean Carter and Carla Hills to host the show, we spent the winter planning and preparing for today, the launch of our new podcast. None of us had ever done anything like this before, and we had to learn everything from square one. Despite our inexperience in media, we are excited to help tell the stories of people in our community. We aim to inspire you, our listeners, to take action in your community, whether that be riding your bike more often, writing your city councilor to tell him or her that bikes are important to you, or starting a bike-fun event in your community. Similarly, if you have a great story to share about people on bikes, we want to hear from you! This show is about ideas. This show is about you.
From all of us, welcome to Bike Town. We hope you enjoy the show.
Ben Cowie
Producer
ps - we've received a little help from bike friends along the way, in particular Colin Sproule (@cawlin) who designed our sharp logo, and Steve Coutts (@SteveCoutts) who takes beautiful photos of bicycles. Thanks, all, for your support so far!
