During the National Bike Summit, Bike Belong announced a new initiative to engage more bicyclists at the grassroots level. Their goals is to “…gather a million names of support, to speak with one, powerful voice to make bicycling safer, more convenient and appealing for everyone.”

Every day, millions of Americans ride for their health, for the environment, for their communities, and for the pure joy of bicycling. But until now, only a fraction of riders have stood up to help improve bicycling in America.

Peopleforbikes.org is going to change all that. We’ll build on the expert work of existing bike advocacy groups — our partners — to develop a powerful movement with the clout and influence to get things done. That means promoting bike-riding on an individual level, but also sending a unified message to our elected leaders, the media, and the public that bicycling should have their full support.

You can help them reach their goal by making the pledge on the People for Bikes web site.

Congratulations to The Hub of Detroit. The League of American Bicyclists has named them as the first gold-level Bicycle Friendly Business in Michigan.

Businesses that apply for the award are contributing to a more bicycle-friendly lifestyle for their employees. The Hub of Detroit serves as an example for best practices and innovations in bicycle friendliness at the workplace. The Hub of Detroit makes bicycling an easy option for transportation and provides amenities such as mechanical assistance and education, ample bicycle parking and incentives such as an ally program where ongoing time commitments to the organization yield expanded access to tool space and time.

“This Bicycle Friendly Business is making a difference for employees, customers, and communities,” said Bill Nesper, Director of the Bicycle Friendly America Program. “The Hub of Detroit promotes bicycling as a viable form of transportation and gives their employees choices and options that make biking to work easy and fun.”

The other Michigan-based Bicycle Friendly Businesses are the League of Michigan Bicyclists in Lansing (silver) and Mel Trotter Ministries in Grand Rapids (bronze).

It was a bit of surprise seeing a Google booth at the National Bike Summit.   They are here to announce biking directions on Google Maps. This is a nice complement to the driving, walking, and public transit directions.

The routing algorithm doesn’t shy away from routing cyclists on some main roads, like Woodward Avenue. Perhaps we can use this as another reason to make Metro Detroit’s streets more bike friendly.

One major issue: Google is showing sidepaths/wide sidewalks as legitimate bicycling facilities when they are not according to national design guidelines. This makes us think SEMCOG may have provided this data to Google. Despite our comments against doing so, SEMCOG included sidepaths/wide sidewalks as bicycle facilities maps. We’ll bring this issue up with Google.

Here’s part of the announcement from the League of American Bicyclists:

This new feature includes: step-by-step bicycling directions; bike trails outlined directly on the map; and a new “Bicycling” layer that indicates bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly roads. The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions – similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible.

Visit http://maps.google.com/biking to try out this new feature. Biking directions for Google Maps is currently in Beta.

If you haven’t heard of or yet signed on the We Declare, now is the time.

What is We Declare? The preamble and principles listed on their website explain it best along with a video.

One principle we can easily embrace is:

Demand transportation alternatives. Invest in an integrated regional transportation system that links communities and provides citizens with access to the jobs, health care, and education they need.

You can also join We Declare on Facebook.

We recently visited the St. Clair County offices in Port Huron, Michigan. We couldn’t help but notice the less-than-useful position of their bike rack.

We spoke with County Parks and they said it was likely moved in order to accommodate snow removal.

Moving it out of the way may make sense, but it makes more sense to locate where it can used year round. Normal people do ride bikes in the winter. Canada’s Yukon Territory has a higher bike to work rate than California and Florida.

The Yukon Territory’s winter weather surely isn’t any better than ours.