Bike-related projects driving effort

The city of Austin is close to getting recognized by top bicyclist organizations.

Vision 2020 volunteers are looking into obtaining a Bike Friendly City designation from the American League of Bicyclists, according to Bike/Walk Trails Committee Chairman Steven Kime.

“It’s a prestigious designation,” he said.

According to Kime, Austin recently learned it was close to the designation after representatives from various bicycling organizations gave Vision 2020 volunteers a practice test. Austin scored quite high in the League of Bicyclists’ five categories: encouragement, education, enforcement, evaluation and planning, and engineering.

That’s in part due to all of the recent bicyclist-related projects going on, from bike lanes on 16th Avenue to an upcoming plan to offer free bike rentals to residents.

“A lot of the things that we’ve been working on, we realized that they’ve been pointed in that direction,” Kime said.

Yet Vision 2020 plans to work with the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota to get Austin the Bike Friendly City designation.

Volunteers hope to raise $5,000 in grants, donations and other means over the next few months to get the designation, which would help Austin market itself to organizations interested in biking.