We always find great stuff over at one of our favorite sites, the CarFree USA blog, and today we learn about Cliff Bar's 2 Mile Challenge. It's pretty simple. Go to their web site at www.2milechallenge.com and enter in your address. Up pops a nice map that shows a 2 mile radius around your house. Wow, is all that stuff within 2 miles? Cliff Bar tells us that 40% of U.S. urban travel is 2 miles or less. So they ask you to ride your bike within those 2 miles to fight global warming. Sounds like a good message.
These guys are on to a good idea, but some of the execution on the web site could be a little better. Once your 2-mile radius Google map is up you can click on places to go such as stores, restaurants and the like. I live within walking distance of Del Ray and Old Town and very few of the dozens of restaurants showed up. At least most of the coffee shops and all of the bike shops where there. However, the idea is powerful. The visual of seeing all that stuff within 2 miles makes you think. I could bike and walk more couldn't I? And check out their 2 Mile Challenge video on You Tube. Great facts and tid bits on how riding your bike can help our environment.
The concept is similar to WalkScore (How Walkable is Your Neighborhood?, July 18, 2007; CommuterPageBlog) which is also Google enabled.
The folks at Cliff have a blog and go a step further and ask you to "take the challenge" and commit to ride. And they just ended a 2 Mile Challenge Tour where they took a 1959 GMC bus - tricked out and running on 100% biodiesel - to college campuses on the West Coast. Maybe we can get them to come East next time. The 2 Mile Challenge reminds us a bit of Arlington's Car-Free Diet where we are asking people to consider an alternative to driving, even for just a few of their trips. The health and environmental messages are certainly similar too.
Congrats to the folks at Cliff Bar (I love those things!) on doing some good work.
Chris Hamilton is the Commuter Services Chief for Arlington County, manager of CommuterPageBlog and a biking/Metro commuter from Rosemont in Alexandria.
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