Bicycle Friendly America Fall 2016 - 16

QBP BICYCLE FRIENDLY BUSINESS travel to Taiwan for business. A highly competitive person who didn't want to let his team down, Tauer borrowed a bike, and scheduled his Taiwan meetings so he could ride from location to location. A year later QBP developed Greenlightride, a public website for creating and administering bike leagues and challenges. The CBL has been a fixture at QBP every year since. For James Broom, the CBL was eye opening. His commute from NE Minneapolis was 20 miles one way, a distance that he felt comfortable riding once or twice per week. But joining the Commuter Bike League in 2014, his first year as a QBP employee, changed everything. He got caught up in the competitive nature of the League and was soon riding 4 to 5 times per week. "It was exhausting, but in a fun way." Broom claims. "I realized that I could do it." He signed up to be League Commissioner the next year, a role he is repeating this year. "The CBL does well to get competitive people engaged," Broom believes, but as commissioner, he wanted to add an element of fun with week-long mini challenges. Those challenges include the Road Trophy award for the best piece of road fodder found and hauled into work, Tricked out Trip for the most decked out and accessorized bike and rider, a geo-caching challenge and a GPS drawing using Strava. For last year's Randonneur challenge-to see who could log the longest one-day bike commute, the winner topped 100 miles. 16 BICYCLE FRIENDLY AMERICA Seth Nesselhuf, QBP's ACE Director, and Gary Sjoquist, QBP's full time advocate, leverage the culture and innovations within QBP to promote cycling outside the company. "We've used Greenlightride and the CBL to promote bicycle commuting in other businesses," says Nesselhuf "and in so many ways, QBP's facilities are so important." Sjoquist agrees. He estimates that he has personally lead over 1,000 people on tours to show off the commuter facilities that QBP employees take for granted. They also know when to target a business with growth potential in bike commuting. When Fortune 500 company 3M, headquartered in St. Paul, entered the National Bike Challenge "they got their butts kicked," according to Nesselhuf, but they had a key person in a leadership role who wanted to see 3M excel in the challenge. QBP invited them to tour its facilities and talk about building a bike commuter culture. It worked. 3M has finished second in the challenge for the last two years. The next step in the process was to get businesses talking to each other about their bike commuting programs. That's being done through the Corporate Forum, developed by Sjoquist and a fellow bike advocate. After retail giant Target, headquartered in Minneapolis, opened its massive new employee bike parking facility and arranged shower facilities for bike commuters at its fitness center, the Corporate Forum invited other businesses to tour the building and talk shop. Discussions revolved around getting management on board, finding the funds, negotiating with fitness centers and other minutia of setting up a bicycle commuting program. This year the Forum used video conferencing to reach out to small and mid-sized engineering firms in the Lake Superior port city of Duluth, Minnesota. The same low key behind-the-scenes work has been used to educate city planners, engineers and public works administrators. Two things stand out about this sort of work. First, it isn't flashy. It isn't lubricated by beer and bike parades and no one wants to read about it in glossy magazines, but converting a Fortune 500 company, dozens of smaller companies and several cities into bicycle commuting powerhouses is a big deal. Apparently even the organizers didn't get it. "I never even thought of this as noteworthy," Nesselhuf said during our interview. Second, there is always a succession plan in place. This is a Sjoquist trademark. Since 1998, he has steadily moved from one advocacy start up to the next and each time he's made sure that someone was ready to take over so he could move on. Nesselhuf, Sjoquist and Broom aren't likely to quit innovating. Nesselhuf's latest goal is to make QBP the first Platinum Level Bicycle Friendly Company in the nation. Sjoquist is eye deep in NICA, the National Interscholastic Cycling Association and Broom is analyzing commuter data to see how he can encourage even more QBP employees to commute by bike. And they aren't alone. Every week someone is organizing a breakfast and group ride to work or a call goes out for loaner bikes to help a visitor experience the nearby River Bottoms mountain bike trail, or an employee takes advantage of the paid bike leave program to spend a month developing bicycle programs outside QBP. At QBP, none of this seems exceptional. It's just part of the culture. Doug Shidell works at QBP. He's eyeing the Sub24hour BaseCamp Mini challenge, to see who can commute to work from the most unique campsite.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Bicycle Friendly America Fall 2016