Campus Renews Its Bicycle Friendly University Certification

For over a decade, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been recognized as a Bicycle Friendly University (BFU) by the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) for its unwavering devotion to promoting and providing a bike-friendly environment for students, faculty, staff, and visitors.

Recently, the LAB renewed the university’s designation through 2027, based on continued efforts and achievements in advancing and enabling safe, accessible, and transformative bicycling opportunities on campus. The Urbana campus is among a select group of 221 colleges and universities in 46 states and the District of Columbia that are taking action to address the health and environmental challenges facing the nation by creating campuses more welcoming to people who bike. 

Associate Vice Chancellor and Executive Director of Facilities & Services Ehab Kamarah said, “We want to encourage even more individuals to regularly ride their bikes on our campus as a primary means of transportation. Being a Bike Friendly University exemplifies our commitment to making that possible by enhancing safety for active transportation modes, modernizing infrastructure, and supporting programs that make it easy, affordable, fun for everybody to bike.”

Highlights of the university’s significant accomplishments include the following:

Engineering

• Completed 100 percent of the high-priority and 72 percent of the medium-priority infrastructure projects outlined in the 2014 Campus Bicycle Master Plan.
• Installed an enclosed bicycle shelter that accommodates 96 bicycles near student residence halls in 2021.
• Established automatic pedestrian and bicycle counters (Eco-Counter) at five traffic locations to better assess current bike land and pathway usage trends.

Education

• Created new bicycle educational videos with closed-captioning that are available for the entire campus community to view.
• Organized a free “Learn How to Ride” bike rodeo class for university students.

Encouragement

• Launched a community-wide dockless bike share program, operated by Veo, which currently provides 750 bicycles on campus and in the cities of Champaign and Urbana.

Equity

• Partnered with the U of I’s Disability Resources and Educational Services unit to review all new construction, renovation, or maintenance projects to ensure that there is an accessible path available in and around impacted areas, including for bicycle navigation. Information about closures is also posted at https://go.fs.illinois.edu/Closures and shared by university social media accounts.

Education & Planning

• Joined a national bicycle registration system (Project 529) in July 2020, which is now available to all university faculty, students, and staff, as well as Champaign, Urbana, and Savoy residents.
• Collaborated with the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District (MTD), City of Champaign, and City of Urbana to improve mobility in the core areas of the community through a federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant. The $47M MCORE Project transformed key corridors into “complete streets” with redesigned street configurations that emphasized dedicated bike lanes, added access to public transformation, and reduced multimodal conflicts.
• Incorporated bike objectives and metrics into the Campus Landscape Master Plan in 2022.

The university’s bike efforts and outreach are chronicled at https://bike.illinois.edu. More information about the BFU program is available at https://bikeleague.org/university. For questions, contact Sarthak Prasad sprasad9@illinois.edu, 217-300-9575.