Bike Host - Building mobility and community through cycling mentorship

The project goal is to evaluate cycling mentorship as a cost-effective method of encouraging more people to cycle as their primary means of transportation, particularly over the short distances that make up a high proportion of daily trips. To reach this goal, Bike Host will enable 60 new Canadians with no bicycle access to become regular commuting cyclists who are willing to invest in the purchase of their own bicycles. Along the way, Bike Host will provide social support and community resources to help participants establish a network of knowledgeable cyclists who are able to offer advice on topics such as bicycle repair, theft prevention, and road safety. The success of the 2014 Bike Host program will be measured by survey materials that are developed by the Toronto Think and Do Tank, and the participant responses will be analyzed by research assistants at the University of Toronto, organized by myself as Research Manager under the direction of Dr. Beth Savan.

Community-based social marketing has been instrumental in detailing the specific processes and tools that leverage social environments to foster sustainable behaviours relating to individual energy-use and waste diversion, but these principles have only begun to be employed to alter the much more complicated behaviours that affect our transportation habits.11,12 The Bike Host research project builds on our previous work promoting behaviour change and bicycle use to new immigrants and secondary school-aged children, and tailors this approach directly to local populations in St. Jamestown and Regent Park. These communities host large cohorts of new Canadians, who have recently changed their lives through immigrating. Evidence is clear that those experiencing life transitions are much more likely to make changes to long-held habits, making these communities ideal targets for travel behaviour change programs.13 Our program creates new social norms for these new Canadians, engaging them through social interaction, community based activities and public statements of commitment to cycling. My research will evaluate this program to identify its success and shortcomings as well as the most important factors in facilitating cycling adoption in this community. The end goal is to use our evaluation data to help refine and modify our behaviour change toolkit by analyzing the results of entry and exit surveys and observing patterns of cycling behaviour in participant trip logs. 13