BWW Advocacy Meeting

Bike Walk Wichita was founded as an advocacy organization, and its mission continues to focus on making Wichita a more livable, accessible, and connected city by making biking and walking safe, equitable, and appealing. The Advocacy workgroup meets regularly to focus on that mission. At our meeting on August 7, we had a good discussion of the status of various bicycle/pedestrian-related initiatives and spent most of the meeting talking about the City’s proposed budgets and how to discuss those in the scheduled public meetings.

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, September 3, at 6:00 pm.

All are invited to attend and participate in this core function. We will be discussing several topics. As you are probably aware, the City’s proposed parking plan has created a lot of backlash. We support the general concept of the plan, but some of the emphases and details of its implementation have not been ideal. We may discuss that more depending on exactly what its status is at the time of our meeting. However, we will focus most of our discussion on other initiatives we want to pursue. These include:

• Wichita Bicycle Master Plan – A proposed plan will soon be completed and submitted to the City Council for adoption. It would be great to have more of our members available to speak in support of it at District Advisory Board meetings and the City Council.
• WAMPO Bike/Ped count – More volunteers are needed for this annual count. You can sign up at https://www.wampo.org/bicycle-pedestrian
• Bike/Ped counters – Automated pedestrian/bicycle counters are being purchased to install around the area. If you have ideas on where it would be useful to install these, let us know.
• Safe Routes to Schools—All of the county’s school districts will begin putting together Safe Routes to School plans. Come to our September 3 meeting to learn how you can be involved in this planning.
• Regional Active Transportation Plan

These are only some current initiatives; we could do more with your help! Join us at our September 3 meeting to let us know what you think we should be doing as an organization and to volunteer for what interests you most.