Bike Walk RVA Academy off to a strong start.

The Bike Walk RVA Academy has begun!  This week we are preparing for the third workshop out of eight for our 20 participants learning to be top-notch bike and pedestrian infrastructure advocates.  During our application period in August and September, over 65 high-quality and highly motivated folks from around the Richmond region applied, and it was a real challenge to choose only 20.

In order to choose a representative group, we decided to focus this session on the City of Richmond with county-specific workshops coming to Chesterfield and Henrico next year.

 

Each week we tackle one new component to being a strong advocate.  We have a strong lineup of guest speakers, too, such as City Council President Charles Samuels, Richmond Times-Dispatch journalist Michael Paul Williams, and City of Richmond Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Trails Coordinator Jakob Helmboldt.

In session 2, our participants were grouped by district to view and discuss draft maps of the Richmond Bicycle Master Plan.  The official plan will be released in the coming weeks.  They will work in teams off-and-on for the remainder of the workshop.  City of Richmond Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Trails Coordinator Jakob Helmboldt gave a presentation on bicycle and pedestrian facility types and was on hand to answer questions during the discussion!

Many thanks to our hosts, The Frontier Project, for their wonderful space!  Our meals, so far provided by Comfort and Jimmy Johns, have been wonderful, too!