Cycling Coalition nominated as Enviro Hero!

The Cycling Coalition was recently notified of our nomination for a 2010 Enviro Hero award in the category of health! The Enviro Hero awards are presented by the Haliburton Highlands Land Trust. Winners will be announced at the Land Trust's annual gala on May 28. It's an honour to be nominated, and we'll keep our fingers crossed!

Green Paper on Bicycling in Ontario

The Ontario Share the Road Coalition has just released a Green Paper on Bicycling in Ontario, entitled "When Ontario Bikes, Ontario Benefits". You can see the paper at www.sharetheroad.ca. There are some great recommendations about what the province needs to do to make Ontario a more bike-friendly place. It's great to know that there is advocacy happening for cycling on a provincial level.

The second Ontario Bike Summit will be held in Burlington, September 20-21.

Cycling Updates

The second Minden 150 Bike Tour is scheduled for Saturday, August 14, 2010, hosted by the Township of Minden Hills. This year there will be online registration, and once again various tour options from the challenging 150 km, to a family friendly distance (to be determined).

In other local cycling news, Sue Shikaze and Kate Hall presented at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Sustainable Communities conference in Ottawa on February 12. They highlighted cycling and active transportation initiatives and successes, which include things like the Cycling Master Plan, paving of road shoulders and the Share the Road campaign. Last year's extensive Share the Road project has been attracting lots of attention throughout the province. Sue will be speaking with some people in Wasaga Beach who are interested in doing something similar, and has also been asked to speak about the project in the City of Kawartha Lakes.

Haliburton County is "on the map" for cycling!

Cycling Festival 2010

Mark your calendars for the 2010 Shifting Gears Cycling Festival! It will take place Saturday, June 26 in Head Lake Park in Haliburton. Plans are well underway and we have already confirmed some new booths, including CycleChic (cool cycling gear for women) www.cyclechic.ca and Muskoka Outfitters, who will be bringing bikes to try and doing bike fitting. www.muskokaoutfitters.com Returning will be Wildrock Bikewerks, offering bike maintenance checks. There will once again be family-friendly activities, live music and a great lunch. It's never too soon to start thinking about cycling!

Our New Blog!

Welcome to our new blog! I'm doing a bit of a test to see what happens, being new to this...and am still working on the look of the site. But here's a picture from last year's cycling festival just to get things started...