 Hello my friends and welcome to beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. I've actually never been here before in my life and I'm really excited to be here because I am here for the Places for Bikes conference put on by People for Bikes and it's a conference with hundreds of elected leaders from all over the country who want to make biking better in their communities and you know I love bikes and that's why I'm here and we're going to make a lot of new friends this week. People come here because they want to improve their cities overall and they want to do it through bicycling and they want to do it quickly and in a smart way so they're going to get inspiration and best practices and just going to get fired up and feel like they can achieve and we're going to help them do that and we're going to do it in 48 hours starting right now. This has been a remarkable journey here in Indianapolis over the last eight years or so bicycling for this city. We set out and got very very aggressive and had a goal of putting 200 miles of bike lanes and trails into place by the end of my term in 2015. It's time for draft and draft is an event they do all over the country actually and it's a mix of beer and speakers and inspiration and just mingling and bike love. The mission of the UCI is to promote cycling worldwide working with 190 national federations but it's not only to develop bike racing within the 190 federations it's also promoting cycling as a form of transport. All right that was awesome these people are amazing I am super inspired and it was only one afternoon I still have two full days left. Better get some rest. We're getting to see examples of the the the best outreach work the best encouragement work the best infrastructure work that's going on in the country. Building better places to bike in Tucson does great things for our community especially obviously for public health and environmental health but also for the equity of our community. You know Tucson's a relatively poor city and we have a lot of people who depend on biking and walking and transit to get around so it's really important that we're serving the needs of all Tucsonans but also the more we make bicycling accessible for everyone for my mom for my grandparents for our kids the better our community is going to be the healthier we're going to be the better connected our community is going to be the more visible and beautiful and thriving will be will be a place people want to come. Look I love bikes because of the flexibility that it provides that it provides you to be able to commute just to be able to enjoy recreationally the community that I live in. Bikes are just a core part of a core part of life so in Tennessee we're making cycling easier for people by one number one big thing is policy we're putting in place policy to make sure that the way we design our roads throughout the state are more conducive to cycling. I think a lot of careful thought and attention has gone into selecting the speakers of this conference. It's one thing to get a national figure who's inspiring it has an inspiring story but to have someone who cut their teeth working at the local level in the mayor's office making decisions that ultimately would shape the future of their city that's what so many of us are trying to do and Valerie Jarrett was a truly inspiring keynote speaker. What gives me optimism by now is being here with you and you see people who are you could all be at work and you're here advocating for something you believe in so to the degree that we can all not spend time kind of being critical of things we can't control but look at what we can do and figure out how to be intentional and positive in your own lives. Since this is a bike conference we probably should ride some bikes. Tell me about the Caltill Trail. Yep so it's an eight mile urban bike and pedestrian path in downtown Indianapolis it also doubles as a linear park it connects all of the city's greenways it intersects with our bike lanes that are on street our bus system and we have the great pacer's bike share system that was built on top of the trail. Unlike in these twinkly lights our tour guide just said that there's been over four million dollars invested in art along the cultural trail that's pretty impressive. It's always lit so that safety is never really someone's concern if they're on the cultural trail. I gotta be honest I really didn't know anything about Indianapolis before coming here and now that I'm here I'm really impressed. Alright let's play with some e-bikes. Electric bikes get more people out on bikes and life on two wheels we all believe life on two wheels is a little bit better. This is amazing I had no idea how much fun this would be like you can choose which level of boost that you want for your ride and it just makes a little bit smoother a little bit more supercharged and you can kind of choose how much energy you want to expend. Electric bikes are so fun I love these things you barely have to pedal and you just start cruising I mean you're still getting a little bit of exercise even though you're on an electric bike it's good for you you're getting outside you're breathing fresh air. One of our goals is basically putting as many smiles on the road as we can because it's fun to ride and it's a good exercise so we'd like to see more and more of these parodies all over the states. I mean you can't like have a bad time on a bicycle ride they're just pure joy lots of fun and you know they make people happy and bring people together. So I'm really excited tonight we are unveiling our much anticipated city ratings which is a new system to evaluate how cities are doing for bikes. We have cities in the audience who are getting awards and they don't know what they're getting yet so we're really we're really pumped to present them with a little something to thank them for their progress on helping build better places for bikes. Fantastic because we are all working towards the same thing right and we want to make cycling better we want to make we want to grow it nationally and so we each as different communities have a role to play to make cycling great and so we learn from one another and that's what it's all about. The city rating system is a way for cities to understand what kind of impact they're having for bicycling in their community on an annual basis. It's data-driven it uses numbers and facts and figures from more than 47,000 different communities here in the US and lets us set achievable goals in the future that says hey we've done a lot of really great things for bicycling but we still have a lot of work to do and let's get that work done fast but ultimately let's set targets and goals that help us achieve international success. I don't want to keep going to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to show cities how bicycling can be done. I want to go to Tucson Arizona I want to go to Oklahoma City I want to go to places here in the US that are world-class examples for bicycling and this tool lets cities set those benchmarks and move to make them a reality much faster. All right I am leaving here very very inspired I've only been here 48 hours but it seems like an entire week I've gotten to meet people from all over the country and the world and everybody out there is doing such great things to make cycling better in their communities and that leaves me with a lot of hope so I will see you out there hopefully on your bikes. If you like bike content if you like getting outside if you like getting off your couch and enjoying the best of this world please like and subscribe I'm always producing fun videos see you next time