Last Wednesday nine of us (Becky, Paul, Ed, Erik, Bob, David, Barb, Karen, and Jeff) met in the quiet and comfortable clinic room at the back of REI.

I put our mission statement up on the wall:

GAIT’s mission is to promote and enable walking, bicycling and bus riding as practical and fun ways to get around Issaquah.

And we talked about ways our little shoestring non-profit can achieve that mission. Here’s the list of things we came up with:

  • Offer a class on how to use a bike for errands around town
  • Be visible walkers, bikers, and bus riders
  • Wear GAIT-branded leg bands when cycling
  • Start some organized rides on the lesser-known corridors in town
  • Take city council members and city staff on rides/walks
  • Identify problem areas to city
  • File Citizen Action Requests
  • Follow development projects through the process tracking ped/bike/bus impacts
  • Communicate to local businesses to promote ped/bike/bus to employees
  • Ped/bike/bus passports (get stamps at various Issaquah locations)
  • Work with Chamber of Commerce
  • Get Cascade Bike Club to do some of their bike training sessions here
  • Sponsor a Car-free/car-lite shopping day
  • Make GAIT stickers so members are visible
  • Map local ped/bike/bus amenities (trails, bike racks, toilets, benches, sidewalks, etc.)
  • Create bike rack standards and sources to help interested parties do them right
  • Promote bike racks to businesses
  • Tabling at community events
  • Work with police on bike enforcement
  • Ped/Bike/Bus tips in Issaquah Press
  • Work with service clubs
  • Lobby for completion of missing links (e.g., sunset->high point)
  • Colorized bike lanes/bike boxes
  • Bus routes up the hills on Squak, Cougar, and plateau
  • Designated “bike buddy” to help with trip planning
  • Trip partners to help new users on their first ped/bike/bus trips
  • Salmon Days Parade
  • Catchy slogans (e.g., $0.00/gallon)
  • Loaner bikes
  • Bike maintenance collective
  • Ped/bike accident tracking and investigations
  • Bike theft tracking, investigation, and stings
  • Park and walk promotion (combine trips)
  • Find out when the right time is to make sure ped/bike/bus amenities are included in development projects
  • Form a city website monitoring team to identify new developments
  • Alert membership at pivot points so they can contact council/staff
  • Monitor transportation committee
  • Monitor land use committee
  • Cooperative effort with bike shops (e.g., maintenance classes)
  • School bus bike racks
  • Sponsor school bike clubs
  • Get metro/sound transit to give us free ride tickets to give out
  • Highlight time/cost savings for ped/bike/bus
  • Help people over their first efforts at using ped/bike/bus modes
  • Help people with gear selection for ped/bike

Then in the last few minutes of the meeting we talked about how it would be valuable to have some measurements that we could track over time to show how ped/bike/bus utilization is improving. We came up with the following thoughts about measurement

  • Bike lane traffic monitors
  • Work with the Commute Trip Reduction program and help businesses make their targets
  • Do a survey
  • Check what Portland is measuring
  • Measure bike/ped/bus traffic at specific locations over time
  • Grab results from recent East Lake Sammamish Trail survey
  • Measure miles of trail/sidewalk/bike lanes
  • Measure number and distribution of benches, picnic tables, etc.
  • Find out why people are using ped/bike/bus modes
  • Measure time taken between different destinations

The folks at the meeting were predominantly bicycle fans so a lot of this stuff skews that way (though if you squint at it right, most of it applies to all three modes). If you have ideas about how GAIT can promote and/or enable walking and bus riding leave a comment.

Next month we’ll work on narrowing down the list into a set of goals and objectives.