In the bike world, the year begins and ends in the fall, when many bikes are put back in the basement and eyes are set on the next season. With the first drop in temperatures, fairs, European Sustainable Mobility Week and those things.
The 2016/17 cycling year for Bikenomist was one in which we consolidated many activities and started new ones.
For us, this was the year we delved into the topic of events, which we see as a way to continue the narrative of better cities outside the bikeitalia.it Web.
After the experience of Cosmobike Mobility in September 2016 (which we have already recounted here), in April 2017 we organized, on behalf of TRT Transport and Territory, as part of the European project Cyclelogistics Ahead, a conference on food deliveries by bicycle, a phenomenon that has invaded Milan and created new forms of business that deserve to be explored in depth.
Large and small representatives of this world participated. The hall of the Milan Civic Aquarium was full. The communication tool for the event was almost exclusively Bikeitalia.it and related social media.
A few months later we then organized the Bikenomics Forum in Darfo Boario Terme, a training day on the topic of cycling tourism economies, an event desired by the Adamello Park and DMA Valle Camonica to raise awareness among local administrators and operators of the economic opportunities that cycling tourism can offer. We brought leading experts in bicycle tourism to Darfo Boario Terme who, while in the morning addressed policy and vision issues, in the afternoon went into the merits of bicycle infrastructure design with training credits for architects and surveyors.
Good audience.
Starting in May, we began to think about a festival, something that would bring together the storytelling of different cities and territories with the practical, pedaling exercise of this theory to be paired with training in the practical use of bicycles, film screenings, exhibitions of paintings, telling of travels, experiences, and all that sort of thing.
The result was the Pavia Lebici Festival: a 4-day event held Sept. 14-17 that involved about 3,500 people with a program of 35 free events, promoted over 2 weeks through social media, posters, flyers, a media partnership with 100 km from Milan and, of course, Bikeitalia.it.
For the occasion, we involved local associations and shopkeepers, we put the world’s largest bikesharing companies around a table so that they could tell what is happening and what is going to happen in our cities. Lombardy’s greatest cycle travelers told their stories to an audience as interested as ever, while engineers from the Milan Polytechnic proved irrefutably that a development in bicycle use brings enormous benefits to local commerce. We talked about safety, economics, logistics, transportation, handbikes, nutrition, stretching and electric bikes-in short, everything that revolves around the bicycle theme.
The city reacted positively by raising a debate on the issue of bicycle use, and within days, of the event, the discussions in the newspapers are less and less about “bikeway yes, bikeway no” and more and more about how to make bikeways and how to rethink the space allocated to cars to solve the traffic problem.
We still have many plans in mind for next season and aim to amaze you again.
If you, too, have an event dedicated to cycling in mind, contact us: together we will turn Italy into a bicycle-friendly country.
