COMMUNITY SURVEY

The community survey used for the 2018 Benchmarking Report is based on the application for a Bicycle Friendly Community (BFC) award. The BFC program was created in 1995 and significantly updated to its “5 E” (Engineering, Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, and Evaluation & Planning) format in 2002. It has been updated periodically since then in order to account for new actions taken by communities, such as bikeshare and an increased interest in separated or protected bike lanes. In 2014-2015 it was updated as part of the League of American Bicyclists’ Equity Initiative.

The Benchmarking Report began in 2007 under the Alliance for Biking and Walking. Its city survey was not coordinated with the BFC application. In order to provide comparable data, supplemental questions were added to the Fall 2017 BFC application round and can be found at the end of the survey. Each question added for specifically for the Benchmarking Report begins with the prefix BMR.

In several cases, there were questions in the existing BFC application that closely mirrored but did not precisely follow past Benchmarking Report questions. Existing questions that were modified after comparison to past Benchmarking Report questions are highlighted in GREEN.

The community survey was distributed to all contacts that had submitted past Benchmarking Report surveys to the Alliance and the most recent contacts who had submitted BFC applications for the 67 of 69 communities included in past Benchmarking Reports that had participated in the BFC program. Distribution occurred through several rounds of email and phone calls in some cases, including to new contacts identified from community websites.

You can learn more about the BFC program at https://bikeleague.org/community.