I Want to Ride My Bicycle

The bike racks are overflowing at Crestview Elementary School in Boulder, Colorado, even after additional ones have been built.

It’s not uncommon to see parents hanging out around the racks after school starts, and leaving from there on group bike rides.

What has made Crestview the Grand Central Station for bicycling on Colorado’s Front Range? The quest for an iPod.

Crestview served as the first testing grounds for a program run by the non-profit organization Freiker (rhymes with “biker” and stands for “FREquent bIKER”).

Freiker is working to get kids cycling to school by offering them ever-cooler prizes the more they ride. They track the kids’ rides to school with solar-powered technology.

Kids who join the program attach tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) tags—the same identifying tags that are used to “chip” pets, in passports, and in warehouses-- to their helmets. When kids ride to school, they cruise under a solar-powered RFID-tag reader—called the Freikometer--that registers their ride. (Freiker does not require identifying information about the kids.)

When they reach milestones of ridership—10 or 20 rides to school, for instance—they can trade their points in for prizes like water bottles or cycling computers. But if they ride to school 90 percent of school days, they get an iPod or a digital camera at the end of the year.

Last year they gave away 37 iPods to Crestview students, representing almost 8 percent of the student body. Check out the figure at left to see how ridership has grown. When the weather is warm, about 25 percent of kids bike to school.

Freiker was started by software developer Rob Nagler, whose kids attended Crestview. He was having a hard time getting his kids to ride just a mile to school. He started out tracking ridership with punchcards and later moved on to bar codes, offering incentives for ridership milestones. Looking for a fully automated approach, he developed the solar-powered RFID system.

Having the RFID tags on the helmet has the added bonus of requiring kids wear helmets when they ride.

The organization has installed the system in a handful of Colorado schools and is now aiming to grow the program nationally. Program director Zach Noffsinger says once the program expands beyond sunny (if sometimes snowy) Colorado, they will let individual schools set their criteria for an iPod.

That's probably a good thing, because I'd wager that here in Minnesota it is below 0 Fahrenheit in the morning on close to 10 percent of school days. Biking those days to hit the 90 percent mark would be a tough sell for parents.

Still, we could all be a lot tougher than we are, and the right incentive might get us to buck up on many days we otherwise wouldn't. Keep on pedaling, kids.

Now we need a similar program for grownups. What would be the right incentive? Annual rebate on health insurance? I can't believe that's what I thought of. Grownups are so boring.