At RDG Planning & Design, more than 50% of the employees participate in Bike to Work Day. The company earned the first Silver Level Bike Friendly Company award in Iowa.
How it works
- Anyone interested in taking the Challenge looks to see if their workplace is already registered. If it isn’t, they register themselves and their workplace team at the same time. They become the Team Captain, by default.
- Their coworkers register and join that workplace team.
- Everyone logs their bike trips during the month of May.
- At the end of the month, the Collective tallies the bike trips and ranks all workplaces in size categories by the percentage of commutes achieved by bike.
- On June 6th, the Collective announces the winning companies in each category at a big After Party. Join us! Details coming shortly.
RDG Planning & Design employees have organized a Bike to Work day for seven years.
What a Team Captain does
By default, the first person to register a company becomes the Team Captain. This can easily be changed later.
The Team Captain has “administrative” abilities on the Web site—they can add and delete team members, change passwords, e-mail the entire team, and more. The Team Captain may also take on some social responsibilities at the workplace, organizing bike commuters’ events or benefits with their company. And if these two jobs are best done by separate people, we can easily add a Co-Captain to any workplace team.
At companies with an official transportation coordinator, it may make sense for that person to be the Captain or a Co-Captain for the BCC.
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How we do the math
The number that determines who wins the overall Challenge in each size category is “percent of commutes done by bike.”
This is how we calculate that number for each workplace:
Participants tell us how many days in May they worked and how many of those days they biked. We assume that all the non-participating employees at the workplace work the same average number of days in May.
We multiply the total number of employees at that workplace by the assumed average number of workdays per employee in the month to get the total number of commutes at that workplace in May. We then divide the number of bike commutes logged through the BCC by that workplace by the total commutes at that workplace to get the percent of commutes taken by bike.
Bike commutes taken by employees who are not participating in the BCC are not counted. A deviation between the average work schedule of BCC participants and that of their non-participating coworkers cannot be counteracted (this is a good reason to get a variety of employees to participate).
team commute rate = sum(team_member_rates) / total_number_of_employees
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What counts as a “bike commute”?
In keeping with our goal of introducing more people to the joys of biking, we have made it easy for people with longer or more difficult commutes to participate in the BCC.
A “bike commute” can be:
- Riding both ways to work by bicycle
- Riding one way to work by bicycle (and the other way by any other mode)
- Riding part way to work by pairing biking with transit, driving or any other mode
If you are not biking all of the way to work, count only the one-way mileage of the bicycling part of your commute when you enter your one-way commute distance.
What counts as a work day?
Any day that you work and make some kind of commute should be counted as a workday on your calendar, even if you’re commuting somewhere other than your usual work location. Sick days, vacation days, or days that you telecommute can be counted as non-work days on your calendar as there was no commute.
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Workplaces are divided into the following size and type categories based on information given us by Captains. .
Businesses and Nonprofits, 1 employee
Businesses and Nonprofits, 2-4 employees
Businesses and Nonprofits, 5-24 employees
Businesses and Nonprofits, 25-99 employees
Businesses and Nonprofits, 100-499 employees
Businesses and Nonprofits, 500+ employees
Public Agencies, 1-24 employees
Public Agencies, 25-99 employees
Public Agencies, 100-499 employees
Public Agencies, 500+ employees
Bike Shops, 1-8 employees
Bike Shops, 9-15 employees
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About this Website
This website was designed and developed by Grapheon Design, Web Collective, and Metaphor Lab.
If you are interested in acquiring a copy of this site to use for your challenge, contact the Bicycle Transportation Alliance.