The 2025 Illinois Bike & Walk Summit, billed as "the state’s most important conference related to biking and walking," was held this past week in Springfield, the state capital. It was organized by Ride Illinois, the statewide cycling advocacy organization.
According to the group's website, the conference's purpose is for "professionals, advocates, and individuals from communities of all sizes to... learn, collaborate, and identify creative solutions related to biking and walking in their community." It was a two-day event on May 7 (with a general program "focused on safety, accessibility, and connectivity") and May 8 (with programs that included "a technical training session for planners, engineers, and municipal staff.") I took Amtrak's Lincoln Service to Honest Abe's longtime hometown to attend the first day.
"When we talk about biking and walking, we're not just talking about transportation, we're talking about our freedom," said Springfield Mayor Misty Buscher at the beginning of the summit. "We're talking about fresh air on a spring morning as we walk. The joyful ring of our bike bell while we're going through our neighborhood streets or the simple peace of a walk to your corner cafe. We're talking about how we build our lives, our relationships, and our communities, step by step, pedal by pedal. We all know the benefits of biking and walking. They improve our physical and mental health, they reduce our environmental footprint and create a safer, quieter, more vibrant street. But what I find most powerful is how these items, walking and biking bring us closer together, to our neighbors, our local businesses, who are the soul of our communities, because that's when you meet those people."
One of the day's sessions was a walking tour through the streets of Springfield to highlight Sangamon County's CONNECT Active Transportation Plan. The plan aims to create safe and accessible transportation that connects people and allows them to walk, bike, and use other non-motorized transportation. The focus of the plan is on improving infrastructure and polices. During the tour, people involved with the project talked about the value of going out and walking through the community.
"We heard the Springfield mayor and this morning talking about wonderful paths, and paths are great, but we think it's really valuable to go out and walk on the streets that people who need to walk every day have to experience," said one of the tour guides. "The recreational component is good and important, but we can't just be focusing on that. Because of all the variety of conditions we experience, some are much less than ideal. I think this is a good tool to get people who might not otherwise think about walking outside of this recreational lens, to what people are experiencing every day."
Some things on the agenda that day were closer to home for Chicagoans. Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) talked about his efforts to improve walking and biking in our city. He mentioned the long-awaited Neighborhood Greenway route upgrades on Wood Street between Milwaukee and Grand avenues in West Town. Read more about that project here. He said the Chicago Department of Transportation will begin construction on Wood in a few weeks.
Ald. La Spata also shared a funny story from his early days on the Chicago City Council's Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety. "I remember the first committee meeting I went to," he said. "I was five minutes late, and the committee was adjourning. Yes, that was because the way that this committee functioned was that people would show up, pass 150 routine ordinances... and then the committee would adjourn. Meanwhile, every single year, we saw increases in traffic fatalities in our city. It was a brutal reality that this committee did not address in any meaningful sense, and I had the opportunity to build a really beautiful, exceptionally competent team of transportation professionals."
Randy Neufeld, the founding executive director of the Chicagoland Bike Federation, now the Active Transportation Alliance, currently co-launching the new walk/bike/transit nonprofit GoodForUs.org, spoke at the end of day one. Before leading attendees in a rendition of a catchy anti-car song, Neufeld gave them two pieces of advice. The first was on leadership, and the second was on taking care of one another.
"In some of the sessions today, I experienced how hard so many of you are working, and the level of change that we want to see is bigger than the ability of all of us in this room to work really, really hard and accomplish," he said. "It's going to take more scale than we currently have, and the way to scale is to build a nest of leaders. And so I'm going to encourage you all to think about spending something like, you know, take 90 percent of your time and continue to work like little Energizer bunnies and be persistent and strong and smart, but take the other 10 percent and focus in on leadership, mentoring folks from all walks of your job, of your community, all different kinds of folks to help you out, to lead things to take new directions, things that you don't have time for, or things that usually that they can help expand on."
"And part of our movement is not just ideas and fighting for bike lanes," he added. "It's supporting each other and helping each other find that next gig, or a more important gig or or a leadership level, or helping being on the board of a not-for-profit organization and pay that person a living wage so that they can work on these things. There's all kinds of things about mutual aid and care among us as a movement that are really important, that we need to think about, that are ultimately important to the cause that we're doing. And again, it's not just getting the policy and the infrastructure built, but the social, the community building, and the cultural infrastructure that goes right along with it."
Those are definitely points that warrant serious consideration by all sustainable transportation advocacy entities in the Land of Lincoln, including Streetsblog Chicago. - John Greenfield, editor
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