 Hi my name is Zita Forth and I'm the city's comprehensive planner and I'm here today to talk to you about the city's redesignation as a bicycle friendly community at a bronze level. The League of American Bicyclists is a national organization and they designate communities throughout the nation regularly after reviewing very extensive applications and so we're excited to announce that this is a continuation of our designation we've actually been designated since 2008 of course that the bar has moved so in 2008 what we needed to do to be a bicycle friendly community at the bronze level was a little bit less than what we need to do these days but we're excited and that designation you know in and of itself may not mean a lot to the average average bike rider or cyclist but what it means to us and why we think it's important is because as part of that designation process we provide a large amount of data and do a good good amount of research to submit to the bicycle friendly community's application panel through the League of American Bicyclists and it's a lengthy application and it goes over things like equity and safety and we look at bicycle and pedestrian fatalities and accidents we look at the infrastructure that has been installed since our last application and the infrastructure overall we look at the types of services that are available to bicyclists and commuters in the city and so it really helps us benchmark our progress and the other thing that's really great about this application process and the part that they haven't actually updated yet is we receive a report card when we are designated so it's a it's a quick usually one or two sheet report card that provides us some really good formative goals for coming four year period that have been measured against all of these other communities so they're every 480 bicycle friendly communities in the nation and so when the League of American Bicyclists looking at our application and working with local advocates and reviewers as well they're also looking at what other communities have found to be successful where other communities have found they they need to focus and so that really helps us kind of refocus our efforts and double down as we move forward into our coming years so we're really excited about this redesignation it's it's not an easy process and it and it's very meaningful to us and we are really thankful for those of you who during the reapplication process participated in the Bicycle Friendly America Community Survey because that's one of the ways that the League of American Bicyclists receives feedback on our reapplication process so thank you if you took that survey and stay tuned to the city's website for updates on on biking and walking Columbia if you haven't and you'd like to you can certainly sign up for our walk by Columbia newsletter we send those announcements relatively regularly every every month or so and it will provide some opportunities for engagement certainly not as many events right now but but certainly as we're looking at projects that scdot is taking on those opportunities for comment we're trying to keep folks surprised of those as well so if you haven't check that out and thank you for joining us