Editor’s Note: Over the next week, the Bicycle Coalition will be showcasing our Year-in-Review, which is also available at BicycleCoalition2016.org
Bike to School Day
Bike To School Day was Wednesday, May 4, and 12 schools (the most ever) participated in the national awareness and fun day. Bike To School Day provided safe spaces for any children at schools in nearly every direction who wanted to bike or walk through their neighborhoods to school.
Safe Routes Philly Coordinator Waffiyyah Murray worked with leaders and students at D. Newlin Fell Elementary School, Francis Willard Elementary School, G. W. Childs Elementary School, Henry C. Lea Elementary School, Loesche Elementary School, Meredith Elementary School, Andrew Hamilton Elementary School, Cook-Wissahickon Elementary School, Albert Greenfield Elementary School, James Sullivan, Northeast High School, and Alexander Adaire Elementary School, to make sure this year’s event was safe, fun, and inclusive to all students, teachers, administrators, parents, and volunteers who wanted to participate.
In addition to creating Walking School Buses and group rides in neighborhoods, schools provided bicycle storage for students, Safe Routes Philly, which is supported by the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health and a National Highway Safety Administration grant awarded to the Office of Transportation & Infrastructure Systems, provided bike swag and lessons for those participating.
Ride for Reading
Bicycle Coalition members and volunteers brought donated books to Andrew Jackson Elementary School in West Philadelphia at this year’s Ride for Reading event as part of the city’s Safe Routes Philly program.
As part of the event, PECO awarded Bicycle Coalition Board Member Amanda Benner their prestigious 2016 Energy For The Community Achievement Award, and they made a video about it.
Ride of Silence
On Wednesday, May 18, hundreds of bicyclists came out to Philadelphia’s largest Ride of Silence ever.
The ride is an annual international event to commemorate and remember those bicyclists who’ve lost their lives to traffic violence on our streets.
Earlier in the day, members of the Bicycle Coalition accompanied Channabel Latham-Morris, the mother of bicycle hit-and-run victim Jamal Morris, to Harrisburg, where we met with numerous legislative staffers representing senators from all over Pennsylvania, to advocate for new red light and speed camera laws.
Morris made the trek back to Philadelphia later that day to light a candle at the Ride of Silence, and participated in several other meetings on Thursday to make Philadelphia’s streets safer.
The Bicycle Coalition and Morris family would soon prevail, getting the red light camera bill extended for 10 years.