About Us
Everyday Cycling started life three years ago as an idea in the mind of British Cycling's Ian Drake, who saw the need for a bright, vibrant online cycling community where you could find out everything you needed to know about leisure cycling; places to ride, leisure events, charity rides, what to ride, advice on kit. Moreover, Ian foresaw a virtual place where leisure cyclists could meet, chat and interact. A website that would at the same time stimulate and record activity, signpost people to taking part in organised events, which for some people, would be a stepping stone for them into the sport or club activities. Thus, the Everyday Cycling concept was born.
To achieve this, Everyday Cycling needed to be more that just a portal. It had to positively encourage activity, which it achieves in four key ways:
- By offering a comprehensive, searchable database of Routes and Rides, giving people of all ages and abilities all over the country information and inspiration
- By offering a broad range of events, catering for every type of leisure cyclist to encourage regular participation and act as a stepping stone into the sport or club activities for many people
- By devising a unique suite of Everyday Cycling interactive features such as Activity Logs, Challenges and Buddy Groups to stimulate and inspire cyclists to get pedaling
- By offering sensible, plain-English advice on bikes, kit and clothing, making the transition to two wheels as smooth as possible.
Key to the delivery of Everyday Cycling was a range of accessible non-competitive events. British Cycling, Everyday Cycling's parent organisation, already had a successful track-record of delivering competitive and mass participation events. However it was clear that to reach the broadest possible spectrum of riders, Everyday Cycling had to look beyond cycling and attract major partners in order to maximise the footprint of Everyday Cycling.
These partners have included Government Agencies and Commercial Partners who have made a significant contribution to getting more people active and connected with organised cycling events and activities.
Sport England and Everyday Cycling
Sport England is the main funding partner of Everyday Cycling and as a result of its contribution over the past 3 years, British Cycling has achieved a 40% increase in participation in events and a 40% growth in membership.
Few activities can rival cycling for its reach and potential to tackle obesity through everyday exercise, to contribute to a 'greener' environment through getting more people to ride to work and schools and the diversity of the range of cycle sports on offer for all ages and abilities from BMX and Mountain biking through to the Tour de France.
Practically anyone can ride a bike! Everyday Cycling is all about getting people active on two wheels and getting healthy exercise back into everyday life.
Tour de France and Transport for London
The Tour de France (TdF) is the world's most famous cycle race and the largest single sporting event in the world. The visit of the TdF to London in July 2007 was a historic occasion. Not only did the tour visit London for the first time but the start of the race, or Grand Depart, was held in the UK for the first time. The aspiration of all stakeholders involved in bringing the Grand Depart to London was to use it to get more people cycling. Everyday Cycling played a key role in the activation of the Grand Depart through the British Cyclosportive event which was a 120 mile Challenge Ride over the route of Stage 1 of the TdF, involving 4,000 participants and Everyday Cycling's support of TfL's London Workplace Cycle Challenge through the use of the activity logs/ challenge functionality.
Commercial Partners
Everyday Cycling has worked with a number of commercial partners on projects to create new opportunities for people to ride their bikes. As part of Tesco's aspiration to get 2 million people active in the run up to 2012 a series of community Bike Active cycling events were held during 2006. Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) supported Everyday Cycling through its GSK Routes and Rides programme which included downloadable route cards detailing great traffic free routes and a series of mass participation leisure events in key cycle friendly locations throughout the country.
The Future
Everyday Cycling is expanding at a rapid rate with a whole new range of features and functionality on the website being developed for roll out early in 2008 to enhance the experience of visitors and users of the site. The calendar continues to grow and we expect to see over 300 organised events being promoted during 2008 and we have developed an on-line organisers toolkit to support the deliver of events and ease of entry for participants.
Finally we are in discussions with a number of National, Regional and local partners about the expansion of the programme in 2008 onwards to create more opportunities to get people out on their bikes and cycling regularly and to continue to grow and expand Everyday Cycling in the run up to London 2012.