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Chadwick Cardott

Matt Pitchford

CMN 220

20 October 2017

Ride Illinois

Ride Illinois is a cycling advocacy group located in Aurora, Illinois. With roots in the

late 1980’s, this group seeks to advocate for policy that improves the overall comfortability of

cyclists throughout the state of Illinois. Ride Illinois originated as a chapter of the League of

American Bicyclists, the League of Illinois Bicyclists, and later developed into its own

standalone group, Ride Illinois. The group advocates for bicycle friendly road designs and

policies for the general safety of cyclists, advocates for bicycle trail development funding at

local, state, and federal levels, and seeks to educate public officials on how their towns can be

more bicycle friendly. The organization also strives to create new and more effective education

programs for cyclists and motorists, with the safety of the cyclist being their top priority. The

group also proposes and supports legislation supporting cyclists’ rights on the road. Ride Illinois

has had a presence is Washington, D.C. when defending federal funds for trails and bikeways,

and preserved $20 million of these funds at the state level. The group has also participated in

planning cycling routes in 17 towns in cities across Illinois, helping dozens more. The group is

integral in creating public policy regarding cyclist in the state of Illinois, and provides a nice

window into the world of advocacy groups.

Based in Illinois and focusing on Illinois funding, Ride Illinois faces some serious

funding problems. If the state cannot provide a state budget for the year, how can an

organization like this ask for continued support of taxpayer dollars to continue funding their
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efforts to make Illinois a safer place for cyclists, and continue their education and development

goals? Their goals of trail development and making roads safer for cyclists are certainly not seen

as priorities to policy makers currently. Illinois is presently much more concerned with the

budget deficit, which makes the $20 million in funding they were able to secure even more

impressive. Their Twitter footprint is not exceedingly large, with a small following of 513 at the

time of writing this paper. With this taken into consideration, it seems like most of their

persuasive power comes from getting elected officials to attend their annual cycling summit.

The 2018 Illinois Bike Summit will be held on May 7, 2018 at the University of Illinois in

Chicago. We can see from the location of the event that the organization is clearly prioritizing

public officials in the Chicago area.

Much of their work is focused on securing funds for developing a cyclist friendly

atmosphere within the state of Illinois, but some of their other work includes lawmaking. In the

last few years, Ride Illinois has made some important steps toward improving the overall quality

of cycling in the state of Illinois. In 2007, “Ride Illinois wrote and successfully lobbied for

passage of the 2007 state law amending the Illinois Vehicle Code by: specifying a minimum 3-

foot (lateral) passing clearance for motorists passing bicyclists, allowing bicycle riders the option

of using the right arm to signal a right turn, adding an exception to the law on a bicycle’s lane

position being “as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge” – to reduce “right-hook”

crashes”. (rideillinois.org) The group also successfully helped draft a law that required the

Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists when

completing roadwork. They have also helped to implement the use of bike lanes on roads. Bike

lanes in Illinois not only make it safer for cyclists to ride on regular roads, they also provide a

liability claim for cyclists involved in accidents when there is a bike lane present. Struggling
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with the obstacle of funding, Ride Illinois has been able to succeed in their goals through their

use of rhetoric online, through their annual GITAP bike tour, and their annual summit.

Ride Illinois utilizes a few different pieces of rhetoric in their quest to make the lives of

cyclists in Illinois easier. One of these persuasive efforts is their online presence. The main

aspect of Ride Illinois’ online presence is their website. Their website is organized nicely, and

presents an “about us” section on their landing page. This location for the “about us” section of

their website easily allows their purpose to be understood to people who have been hyperlinked

to the page from another article, or any others who have stumbled on the page. Upon further

inspection, the Ride Illinois website offers a neatly organized page under their “Advocacy” page.

This page provides nice thumbnails with easy to understand topics for each link. This

presentation allows for the casual reader to quickly access links to articles about past success,

future plans, as well as pages that describe Ride Illinois’ current involvement in cities around the

state of Illinois. Aside from their website, Ride Illinois also has a moderate Twitter presence.

With only around one thousand followers, the organization is still in the process of reaching

people who side with their cause, but this Twitter presence is clearly a step in the right direction.

At the current time, their Twitter account is mainly used in a newsletter format. The

organization releases periodical updates on the policies they are pursuing, and events for the

cause. These two forms of rhetoric in Ride Illinois’ online presence help with the most

important part of political activism: activists. Through their Twitter, they are able to spread their

cause to people who might feel the same way about the current quality of cycling in the state,

and direct them to their website, where they can become more involved with the cause. Online

persuasion is critical in gathering activists, and mobilizing them to accomplish organizations’

goals in the modern, technology based world we live in today.

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Another way in which Ride Illinois persuades is through their annual GITAP bicycle

tour. Each year, the organization organizes the Grand Illinois Bike Tour which spans over 300

miles in northwestern Illinois. In my area, the Quad Cities, most people have never heard of this

cycling tour, and is often overshadowed by the Iowan version of this event, RAGBRAI. This

event spans all of Iowa, ending in the Quad Cities, which could be a reason it overshadows the

efforts of Ride Illinois. The scheduling of this event is important to the organization to continue

gaining support. By scheduling this event yearly, Ride Illinois not only keeps the same group of

people engaged with their cause, but also increasingly spreads their footprint in the state of

Illinois. Each year, increasingly more people attend this event, helping Ride Illinois reach its

core audience, Illinois citizen-cyclists. As Ride Illinois reaches increasingly more citizens, a few

of them will become advocates for increased quality of life for cyclists in Illinois. This event is

particularly efficient because it targets only cyclists, and much of its publicity is not wasted on

those uninterested in the cause. One critique of this event is the scale. If Ride Illinois wants to

reach more potential advocates, they should try to expand the route on which the annual bike

tour takes place. The tour currently takes the form of a circular route, beginning and ending in

Byron, Illinois, and visiting relatively small cities on the way. The most populated area that the

tour goes through is the Quad Cities with a population estimated at 370,000 in 2007.

(quadcities.com) If the tour were to reroute on a more linear path, perhaps starting near the

Chicago area, and ending in Springfield, Illinois, Ride Illinois would likely to be able to reach

more potential advocates on the way.

The third and perhaps most powerful form of rhetoric utilized by the advocacy group,

Ride Illinois, is their annual bike summit. In September of 2016, the annual bike summit was

held on the University of Illinois in Chicago campus. Previous locations have included
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Bloomington, Illinois, and on our very own campus at University of Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign. From the summit program from 2016, we can tell that the event itself is sponsored

by a variety of groups. The majority of involved groups in this years event were transportation

specific groups, such as IDOT, and planning commissions for various counties and cities. Aside

from that, there were many private groups such as law firms, orthopedic groups, bike shops, and

many other types of groups that sponsored the event. It is clear from the sponsorship page alone

that Ride Illinois is getting their message of improved biking conditions in Illinois out to their

intended audience. Upon further inspection of the program for the 2016 Annual Bike Summit,

we can see that numerous city planners and other city and county level officials were in

attendance, with many of them providing informational speeches with titles like “Your Bikeway

Infrastructure Toolbox”, or “Advocacy: Bikeways for all and Making Biking Better”. (Swartz)

This type of persuasion is even more effective because of the narrow audience it relates to.

Attendees of this event are already interested in improving the quality of cycling in Illinois, and

are now learning the ways in which they can successfully meet that goal.

Overall, the persuasive strategies employed by the advocacy group, Ride Illinois are

generally effective. Through online persuasion at the broadest level, their bike tour at a

moderate level, and their annual bike summit at the most specific level, Ride Illinois effectively

narrows their audience and provides the appropriate level of information needed for each

individual advocate to be as useful to the movement as the organization wants. The largest issue

with this movement seems to be their scale. Perhaps they could improve their online footprint,

attracting a larger audience at each level of the persuasive process, or find other ways to further

advance their policies. In the end, this group is successful because of the members of city

planning and public policy makers they are able to attract on a yearly basis.
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Works Cited

“About The Quad Cities | Quad Cities.” Quad Cities USA - Local & Visitors Guide for Quad

City Metro Area, Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce, 28 July 2016,

www.quadcities.com/about/.

Swartz, Christina, editor. Fifth Annual Bike Summit Program. Fifth Annual Bike Summit

Program, Ride Illinois, 2016.

Swartz, Christina. “About Us/ News and Events.” Ride Illinois, 12 Dec. 2012, rideillinois.org/.