When the first “bicycle mayor–a person who serves as a connecting point between city departments, nonprofits, and other bike advocates– was chosen in Amsterdam in 2016, the idea was to help an already bike-obsessed city become even more bikeable. Butt the program was never intended only to be about Amsterdam. The nonprofit behind the idea aims to bring bike mayors to 200 cities by the end of 2019. The program is already in nearly 30 cities, from São Paulo to Istanbul.
“We really want to try and take that Dutch approach and not only use the culture here as a playground for new ideas, but then take that approach and those ideas and work around the world very quickly,” says Adam Stones, strategy and communications director for Bycs, the nonprofit that created the bicycle mayors program.
The “mayors” aren’t part of local government, but volunteers who are recommended by local cycling groups, and sometimes voted on by the public in an unofficial election. “How it works in Amsterdam might be different from how it works in Beirut or Bangalore, but the idea is the same: You stand in the middle of all of the stakeholders across the city,” he says. “That’s the cyclists, the advocates, the government bodies, the political leadership. And you try to listen to all of those groups and identify what the areas are where you can really accelerate some change and make some impact by bringing all of those groups together.”In most cases, the bike mayors are people who have been deeply involved in bike advocacy for years. Each of the cities, of course, also has existing organizations already working on improving cycling. But the unique nature of the role and the ability to coordinate between different groups makes a difference, says Tiffany Mannion, who works in the small city of Keene, New Hampshire, and is the first bicycle mayor in the U.S. “It’s nice to have one centralized voice,” she says. “And honestly, especially in the U.S., it’s so much easier to do as a party of one than a committee meeting month to month. It’s a great way to speed things up. We have to catch up to provide alternative transportation.”
The nonprofit wants to use the network to aim for an ambitious goal of moving half of all local trips to bikes by 2030 as a way to address climate change, air pollution, health, and other urban challenges. “We really feel confident that some cities are going to be able to make the leap,” says Stones. “We also know that the challenge is huge. We don’t shy away from the fact that this is a big challenge in some cities that have very low adoption in cycling rate right now, that don’t have necessarily the infrastructure, or that have cultural connection to other forms of mobility. But by setting this mission, we challenge ourselves every week to find out what these challenges are, to actually meeting this ’50 by 30′ goal, and coming up with new ideas to address them.”