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Elliot’s Bike

On Cultivating a More Positive Perception of Biking

Corey Acri
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

About two years ago, I came across “Overcoming Obstacles to Bicycle Riding” by Dustin Dobrin of the National Sporting Goods Association (you can find it on page 6 here). Dobrin concludes, among a bunch of other really interesting discoveries, that “youth participation [in biking] declined from 17.6 million in 2000 to 10.1 million in 2014.” That means we are missing out on an opportunity to excite a new generation of riders. So with youth participation in biking on the decline, you have to ask yourself what the cause may be. Let’s play a quick game to try to find out:

If you are a parent, take a survey of all the children’s toys, books and shows you purchase, read, and watch. Then take a quick glance at how many of those toys and shows involve forms of transportation. And how many involve vehicles with combustion engines (cars, trains, trucks, planes)? Quite a bit, right? Now, just for fun, check how many involve bicycles. I would venture to guess that, for the most of you, the answer is close to zero.

I have only been a parent for a few years now but in those years I have scoured the Earth for positive examples of biking to share with my kid. Yet, only a few instances of non-car or non-train books or shows for children:

  1. Curious George Rides a Bike (in which he hardly rides a bike).
  2. A page in my kid’s coloring book where Donald and Daisy Duck are riding a bike.
  3. A Sesame Street sticker book with a cartoon bike sticker.
  4. An old “Kermit and the New Bicycle: A book about honesty” book.
  5. Mouk, which is an awesome and positive cartoon that teaches children about the wonders of travel all while riding around the world on a bike!

If you are my age, you might remember that, in the 80s, bikes, specifically BMX bikes, were portrayed as awesome ways to get around; the coolest kids rode bikes — they were Rad. Heck, even an alien from another planet’s primary form of transportation (on Earth) was a bike. Yes, Elliot’s bike basically saved E.T.

Athough this may all seem silly, there is a small but important point to be made here — very little is being done in popular culture to promote what is indisputably one of the best ways to get around, stay healthy, interact with your friends, neighbors, community and, generally, assimilate to your surroundings.

If our popular culture fails to cultivate positive perceptions of biking, we are missing an opportunity to focus the attention of our youth on a form of transportation we so desperately need right now.

So let’s cultivate a more positive perception of biking early and often by promoting the shows, toys and books that do so and, most importantly, creating new ones.

Corey Acri

Written by

I identify problems on the city, industry or institutional scale and use strategy, design and tech to fix them. @AG_Strategic @CyclePhilly @whyabike

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