I have to write a 25 page paper for a Public Policy class. I have decided that something bike related could keep my interest throughout the ordeal, but I have yet to narrow my focus. I am tentatively thinking about bicycle based urban planning or bicycle riding and public health. Does anyone know of any places to get statistics of any kind about bicycles? Does anyone have any great ideas about a topic? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated, although maybe not as much as the 50 degree weather that we are about to get here in the Twin Cities. It's been a cold winter. Thanks.

You should just poke around the 'advocacy and safety' and 'general cycling' pages of this forum; there are plenty of posts with links to various sites with policy papers, stats, etc.

Here's a short list of links to get you started:

http://www.22september.org/
http://www.best.bc.ca/
http://bicycleuniverse.com/index.html
http://www.sfbike.org/
http://www.chibikefed.org/
http://www.bikewalk.org/technical_assistance/resources_information/publications/centerlines.htm
http://www.transalt.org/about/member.html
http://www.communitycyclingcenter.org/
http://www.vtpi.org/
http://www.lesberries.co.uk/cycling/cycling.html
http://policy.rutgers.edu/papers/10.pdf
http://policy.rutgers.edu/papers/11.pdf

Good Luck!

Tell them to put the storm drains off the edge of the steets, under the edge of the sidewalks. This will provide an additional 2 ft at the edge of the street for the cyclist to use.

Four public policies would do much to promote cycling: 1) bicycle-friendly road design, including bike-sensitive traffic signal detectors, traffic calming, wide curb lanes, ban on street parking; 2) stricter standards for obtaining and retaining a driving permit; 3) strict personal accountability for all road users; 4) mandatory "effective cycling" training integrated into all motorist education, including traffic school courses.

5) a police state to monitor everyone all the time.

As an old fashioned former graduate student myself, here's an idea: look in Lexis-Nexis, Ebsco or any of the academic search engines for legitimate JOURNAL articles on the subject, not just non-academic internet sites. If you want any legitimacy to your argument, you have to research legitimate studies. While I'm sure the advocacy groups have done legitimate studies, I don't think the full text of the study would necessarily be located on their websites, most likely just the highlights.

Some of the Rutgers links that were noted earlier fall into this category of having the full text available.