Utah Strong Towns Group Takes City Council Candidates for a Ride
A family bike ride hosted by the Strong Towns Local Conversation group in Orem, UT.
One core tenet of Strong Towns is that no one, no matter how dedicated, can fix things in their community alone. Another is that local government is the most important and representative level at which to effect change in a community. A Strong Towns Local Conversation in Orem, Utah, combined these two concepts to great strategic effect by inviting its city council candidates on a bike ride.
Timo Christensen says the Orem group had started its family bike rides months before last November’s election. They began when a local member suggested communal rides were an effective way to improve mental health for youth and teenagers. There was no formal agenda, just an opportunity to bring local citizens together to talk and pedal. Christensen says that vision has since expanded to see “bikes as a tool to kind of build a community.”
So, with a ride scheduled before the 2023 election, the local group invited all 12 city council candidates to participate, and six took them up on the offer. Christensen said the goal wasn’t to lobby them on specific issues, it was to expose them to the city’s cycling infrastructure, and to the people trying to improve it. It helped that this became one of the biggest rides the group had staged, with 40 to 50 participants, many of whom responded to promotions on Facebook and Instagram.
Six of Orem’s city council members gather to join local advocates for a bike ride.
On the ride, the members and candidates got to experience their city at slow speeds and human scale. Christensen says cycling is a mixed bag in Orem, with an intimidating, stroad-like highway through the center of town, but other areas where cars, bikes, and pedestrians can interact safely. For this day’s ride, they chose to focus on what Christensen calls the “best active transportation infrastructure” in Orem to show how it works when it’s well designed and enable a conversation about how to expand human-powered options.
Like most cities, Orem faces multiple challenges around housing and transportation. But when the policy debate around housing became contentious (as so often happens over density), the local group decided to “focus on something when we know we can make a difference,” and has gotten greater traction advocating for active transportation, such as children walking and biking to school.
Among the issues they’re engaged on include updates to the city’s bicycle and pedestrian master plan, for which several Strong Towns members showed up to testify before city council. In another case, a crosswalk was removed after a school was consolidated with another, and the group is helping the neighbors who are seeking to have it restored. And Strong Towns members are helping local schools organize “bike buses,” in which children get supervised group rides
Christensen says that the best parts of the bike rides have been seeing infrastructure challenges at a granular level with the people who experience them daily. He sees the Strong Towns role as guiding those seeking change to the people and agencies who can address them. “One of the great things we have as a group is that we can look at the neighborhoods in small scale and connect to larger scale plans where work gets done.”
Many local advocates lament that they can’t come up with direct solutions to the problems their communities are facing. Christensen advises success can come from a humbler approach: “We don't have to be the group that says we know what's right… We can simply connect people to advocate for what they want.”
Thanks to Christensen’s and his local group’s efforts, that connection now includes two new members of the Orem City Council. Jeffrey Lambson and Chris Killpack joined the ride, won their races, and now bring that vital experience, and their Strong Towns contacts, into city government.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.