Bicycle Friendly Business Program
Yes, this is awesome: The Bicycle Friendly Business Program from the League of American Bicyclists:
Bicycle Friendly business program
Bicycling is good for communities, for businesses, and for people. It promotes active, healthy lifestyles, reduces traffic congestion, and improves air quality — and it’s fun!
The Bicycle Friendly Business (BFB) program recognizes employers’ efforts to encourage a more bicycle friendly atmosphere for employees and customers. The program honors innovative bike-friendly efforts and provides technical assistance and information to help companies and organizations become even better for bicyclists. This new initiative complements the League’s Bicycle Friendly Community (BFC) program, which has been recognizing cities and towns for their bicycle friendliness since 2003.
It’s brilliant. What else is there to say? Congrats to the League of American Bicyclists on a job well done!
This was definitely something we were hoping for, so this goes to show that if I think something is a good idea, then someone thought it was a good idea two years ago, and someone started implementing it at least six months ago. 
What is a Bicycle Friendly Business?
A Bicycle Friendly Business (BFB) is a corporation, organization, association, or nonprofit that actively promotes bicycling for transportation, recreation, exercise, and sport. A BFB practices social responsibility by weaving bicycling into the business culture and gives employees the opportunity to be active stewards of their personal and environmental health through bicycling.
The Bicycle Friendly Business program evaluates applicants’ efforts to promote bicycling in four primary areas: encouragement, education, engineering, and evaluation.
This is absolutely incredible. The website is full of news and information and questions and answers about everything related to bicycling and businesses.
Now it’s up to us. We need to go over the site, read through everything, and then take it to our companies. We can go to HR, the Health & Wellness folks, other cyclists, anyone we can think of. We should express an interest in participating in the BFB Program whether we think our company is ready yet or not. If our company is not ready yet, we can at least go through the survey and application process (free, thanks to the Bikes Belong Coalition and Trek), and find out where we stand. A business can earn a status of platinum, gold, silver or bronze . If we don’t earn a BFB designation the first time around, no worries—we just get to work and re-apply in six months. It’s easy. We learn a lot in the process. We get more people biking and interested in biking. It’s an absolute win-win situation all the way around.
Businesses can apply twice a year—in March and in August. The next application deadline is August 15. So you can apply up through and including August 15th. If your business earns a designation, you’ll be notified and you can set up a press conference, you’ll be listed on the League of American Bicyclists website, you’ll be included in a national press release, and so forth. It really seems like a very well thought out program.
Anyone in the business can fill-out the application survey. We just need a “business leader” to sign off on it. That could mean a whole bunch of different positions, depending on the size of your company, but I figure the HR department is a good place to start. For myself, I’m planning on taking it straight to my HR Manager and making sure all my fellow cyclists know about it, and I’ll see what we can get going. I can’t wait! 
…p.s. I’m guessing I saw this new here, and I’m hoping we can somehow revisit the Carfree Portland 2008 Conference via video, but I’m not sure about that one yet - I’m checking with Stickam and CrankMyChain.tv.
…Update: We found a fairly obvious “we will save you money” argument for businesses:
Cities could restrict car traffic
If regulations take effect, employers would have to encourage transportation options
By Margaret Allen
updated 4:00 a.m. ET June 23, 2008Hammered by highway congestion, North Texas cities could soon try to pressure large employers to cut the car trips their employees take to work, in exchange for getting major highway construction on adjacent roads.
Urban planners at the North Central Texas Council of Governments hope to see such city ordinances in place by 2009, according to Senior Program Manager Natalie Bettger. The goal is to both reduce traffic congestion and cut pollution to improve the region’s dirty air.
The article is worth a read.
Two websites mentioned in the article:
I like the idea. Why not? As long as we make sure that the North Central Texas Council of Governments knows that lots more people will voluntarily bike to work if we have the appropriate bicycling infrastructure.
I’d also like to make sure that all of these organizations know of the Bicycle Friendly Business Program.
Thanks to the Austin Cycling Association email list for the tip!
