University Place

>> We are pleased to introduce Rob Gusky as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Rob Gusky is the president of the Fox City Cycling Association, an innovative nonprofit bike advocacy group in Wisconsin. In the past two years, FCCA has partnered with the local police department on a bike ambassador program, worked with the Boy and Girls Club to start a trips for kids chapter, organized 50 cyclists to participate in the popular Christmas parade, produced a safety video in response to a local cyclist's death, and hosted an 18-mile ride in February across the frozen surface of Lake Winnebago. Gusky is an engineering technical leader at Kimberly-Clark, a gold bicycle friendly business, where he serves as the ambassador of cycling. He is the creator of the National Bike Challenge, and the 2012 recipient of the Bicycle Friendly America Leadership Award. He is a dedicated bike commuter in Appleton, Wisconsin. Here today to share the story of the National Bike Challenge, which encourages thousands of participants to ride for fun, improved health, and a better environment, please join me in welcoming Rob Gusky.

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>> Okay, thank you, Katie, and welcome everyone. On such a fine day, I appreciate you coming inside and listening about the history of the National Bike Challenge. I drove down from Neenah today, and that's where I work and that's where the National Bike Challenge started. But what I'd like to do is give you some background of how we began this program. I actually grew up outside of Philadelphia in a small town. It's about 10 miles from Center City. A town called Riverton, New Jersey. Very quaint town. This was taken a little bit before I lived there. But it has Victorian homes. You can see there's gaslights there. And today things have changed a bit. There's the gaslights. This is what it looks like today. You can still see the gaslights there. But I grew up in this town in the '70s, and I delivered newspapers. This was one of the streets that my route was on. And really began my love of a bicycle at that time. I remember the day in 1974 when Nixon resigned delivering this Philadelphia Inquire. So, a little bit of history there. And a little bit later in high school I had a neighbor friend, and they had a very nice home in Ocean City, New Jersey, down along the Jersey shore. He came up with this plan. He needed to paint the porch, so he told a few of his friends there if you'd come down and paint the porch with me, you could spend the weekend with us. So we thought it would be pretty cool to actually ride our bikes. And this is a 70-mile journey down there. I'd never ridden more than 10 miles before but thought it sounded like a really good thing, and in those times our parents said no problem, just go ahead and have a good time. So we started the day at our local Dunkin Donuts, fueled up with some carbs. And we did make it to Ocean City. And through that trip, the painting and all of that was fun, but more than anything else I really found out that a bicycle could be a great way to just have some fun and some adventures along the way. So, later on, this is in the early '90s, I took another trip, and from Traverse City, Michigan, if you've ever been to that area, and down along the coast of Lake Michigan, and took the SS Badger across Lake Michigan and ended up back in Appleton. And that was about a 200-mile journey. I did it solo. But, again, it was just so much fun to be out on a bike and riding around. Now, like a lot of things, we do, most of us do need to work for a living. So I went to work for Kimberly-Clark making paper. And during that time, pretty busy with work and the family, didn't do as much cycling. And then an event occurred back in 2008 that really changed my life and possibly some of yours. So, at that time, the price oil slowly was increasing, and there was a lot of talk about peak oil at the time. And that was one of the main drivers of this oil, really gas price increase, and in the summer it topped four dollars a gallon. So where I work at Kimberly-Clark, there's one guy, and he grew up in the Door County area on a farm. Pretty frugal guy. He said, that's it, I'm not going to pay anymore, I'm going to start riding my bike to work. So what we did is on a whiteboard we just put our names there, and every day we biked to work, we kept track of it. And it's hard to explain it, but some of us, maybe all of us, have some level of competition and level of accomplishment, and it was fun just checking off that you rode to work that day. And with gas prices at four dollars a gallon, we were saving real money. So this program expanded throughout Kimberly-Clark. And let me talk a little bit about Kimberly-Clark because it was very fortuitous for me that I worked for a large multinational corporation. We make a number of products you may be familiar with, but one of the great things, we have a lot of employees, thousands of employees all over the world. And when we started biking to work, I looked on our intranet and found out there were similar people biking to work over in the UK and Korea, and I reach out to them and they were very excited to talk about this and ended up putting together an Excel spreadsheet that all of us could access. Instead of using the whiteboard now, we put it into Excel. But it was a very simple spreadsheet and an easy way for us to keep track of who's riding, and we calculated how much we were saving, and it was a lot of fun. One of the people that was initially involved was a marketer. He was in marketing with Scott products. And, again, another very fortunate occurrence, but Scott has a long history that I want to talk about. They actually were involved in bicycles at the turn of the, from the 1800s to the 1900s. So we began this program called Scott Get Up and Ride. They gave us a small amount of funding. We were able to go from an Excel spreadsheet to a real website, and this program began and expanded throughout Kimberly-Clark. So I've got a short video for you. This was initially intended only for Kimberly-Clark employees. So you guys may be fortunate here to see this. This has never been shown outside of Kimberly-Clark. But it will really explain some of the early history and talk about the ties that this program has with Scott. So let me get that going here. Okay. >> Hi. Scott here. Are you ready to get up and ride with the Scott brand? If so, there are a few things you should know. First off, you might be wondering, what does cycling have to do with a paper company? Well, interestingly, the Scott brand first ever consumer product was actually the great Scott bicycle. Over the last hundred years, the Scott brand has been creating products you're surely more familiar with, but it's that constant pursuit of information that still separates this great brand from the competition. Did you know that Scott is the first company to market toilet paper on a roll? Or that it literally invented the paper towel category? Then, in 2009, the brand launched Scott Naturals, a portfolio of products that helps everyone take a green step without sacrificing quality. And most recently, the brand spearheaded the distribution of Smart Flush, a simple device that, once installed in your toilet tank, can save you and your family up to 2,000 gallons of water per year. So it should come as no surprise that the Scott brand is pioneering another simple way you can help the environment but also help yourself. It's a global initiative called the Scott Get Up and Ride program. As a part of the program, all Kimberly-Clark throughout the world are encouraged to bike to work between the months of May and September. Whether you ride once a week or once a month, this small change in behavior can have a positive impact on the environment, on your health, and even on your budget. Just ask the folks in our Taejon, Korea, mill. This group impresses year after year with nearly 25% of their employees participating in the program and by putting up huge numbers in the total distance ridden category. So, get some friends together and get involved. Last year, participants collectively biked over 147,000 miles. That's 237,000 kilometers. And if the health and the environmental benefits don't get you up for it, know that there will be monthly and end of program awarded to participants valued at over $50 each. Some of you will even win custom bicycle jerseys, like this one. So, be sure to register, form your team, and get all the details, rules, and results at our new website. What are you waiting for, Kimberly-Clark? It's time to get up and ride with the Scott brand. We'll see you out there for a safe ride. >> So that video was made in 2009, right at the beginning of the program. Going back to what they talked about, the Scott Paper Company. So they were based in Philadelphia. And in the 1890s, there was quite a boom in bicycles. Scott decided to get involved in that. They made, these were very high quality bicycles. The prices for those days, they are pretty expensive. They made three of them. They only made them for a few years, for about three years out there in Philadelphia. But it was very helpful to what we were trying to do to make that connection back to the early days. So as this program grew, and it was very easy to grow within Kimberly-Clark. We didn't have to hit people over the head with a stick. It was just a natural growth. We had close to a thousand people participating around the world with Kimberly-Clark. It grew year after year. We featured it in our sustainability report. Talked about the program, how we're encouraging people to lead a more sustainable lifestyle. Then a big thing happened for us. We were featured in Fortune magazine talking about what K-C is doing, and that really caused us to look at the program itself and think about this is great, something we've been doing within Kimberly-Clark, but should we go outside of Kimberly-Clark and offer it to others, our customers and just folks out there. So we did. We met with the Wisconsin Bike Fed, right here in Madison. Talked to them, and, in 2011, we hosted the Wisconsin Bike Challenge. The goal was to ride a million miles, and we kind of threw that out there, thought it would be great if we could but we weren't really sure if it would happen or not. The program at that time was a four-month program. It went through the end of August. And when the program finished up, we had achieved a million miles, and we were really happy about that and excited. So, through that, I attended, oh, first let me say I did want to thank the Wisconsin Bike Fed. They've come up with some really innovative ways to encourage people to ride, and this was one they did, I think, in the last two years where Nebraska beat us, but last year we did take the top spot. So a very effective ad here. But after 2011, based on the success of what happened here in Wisconsin, I traveled to the National Bike Summit, and that's held every spring in Washington, DC. Sat down with the League of American Bicyclists as well as had some discussions with People For Bikes, and these are both large national organizations They were really excited about what we were doing and were happy to join us in this program called the National Bike Challenge. So what I'm going to do now is talk about the program, how it works and what we're trying to do with the program. What you can see is the growth in the program. So, if you recall the Wisconsin Bike Challenge, we started out with a million miles, and it's grown throughout the years. And this year our goal is 35 million miles around the country. So we've seen very healthy and continued growth with the program. Let me mention some aspects of it. It's offered free of charge. So it's free for everyone to participate. That's an important part, and we want to maintain that. So this is what we are trying to do this year. Unite 75,000 people is our goal. To achieve the 35 million miles. One thing you'll notice is it's a five-month program. So you might have heard of Bike to Work Day or Bike to Work Week or even Bike to Work Month, but what we're trying to do here is behavioral change, and that does take time. We'll talk a little bit about that. In fact, a few years ago, this gentleman had this to say about it. Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." And what we want to do is we are trying to encourage people to become more active. There's a lot of benefits we'll talk about, but the way to do that is day after day through a habit. So, as we said, we begin in May, which is the start of bike month around the country. It originally ran through August, but the folks that were involved in the challenge said they wanted to have an additional month, so we extended it through September. This is a real important concept. There's two main parts that the scoring system or the point system. One is every day you bike at least a mile, you get 20 points. So it's pretty simple, but it's a very important concept. The other one is then for each mile you ride, our get an additional point. This has brought a lot of controversy, but in a good way I think it shows that this is a very good balance. What I mean by that is you have road cyclists out there. These are people that may just ride on the weekends, and they may put in a lot of miles, but, typically, they don't ride, they may not ride during the week. They want to see more emphasis given to the mileage. Then you also may have folks like this. Someone who's commuting to work. They may not put a lot of miles on, but they're out there every day. So they would like to see more of a reward given to riding on a daily basis. We believe that this balance achieves that. With the points, you get to different levels. You can see all the levels. The diamond level means you have to ride, to achieve that you have to ride every day an average of 13 miles a day. That may be more than what you can do, or more than what you think you can do, but as you start riding a lot of things become possible for you. One of the gold level prizes, one of our most popular prizes, and we award this once a month, is a year supply of Scott toilet paper.

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And as far as recording your rides, we try to make it as simple as possible. So, you can go out to the website, you can manually log your miles. You just go in there and type in how far you rode. However, with the advent of technology, you now, a number of people have smartphones. So there are free apps out there, and by hitting start and stop it will record where you went, automatically upload the rides so you don't have to interact with the site that way. So it makes it very convenient if that's an option for you. And one of the other key things is to, this is where you register for the challenge. It's pretty easy to do, but one of the important things is use of your zip code. By entering your zip code, then we know, basically, what city you're in and what state you're in, and we can use that for the leader boards. So let's talk about the leader boards. This is just a feature. It's just an interesting way to look at all of the people that are participating in the challenge. And you can see a number of categories that we have there. I'll go through some of these. The first one is riders. And we have achieved the 75,000 number of people that have registered. It's now, I think it's over 82,000. So we've made that in the first month. In this particular case, if you look at the number one rider, he is way out in front of everyone else. And you might think that's quite odd. What's going on here with that? Well, this gentleman here is trying to break a record that was set in 1939, and it's for the most miles achieved during a 12-month period. His goal is to bike 75,000 miles this year. That's an average of like 208 miles a day. So, I won't be in the competition with him.

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But he's doing well so far, and it looks like he's on pace to break this. So, for me, it's fun to have him in the challenge. I'm not really competing against him; I'm competing against myself. Another thing you can see is there's riders from all over the country. So that's fun. Top teams, just teams from all over the country. It's a fun way. Some of these teams are quite large, over 300 riders, and the way the teams are set up, it's encouraging just to get anybody because if they ride once and give you 20 points, that's 20 points you wouldn't have had. So it's based on total points. So it works well to encourage people to participate. You might recognize a few of the companies that are up here in the top 20. One thing, the third symbol is Kimberly-Clark, and just to your left of it is 3M. So we have an internal challenge, 3M versus Kimberly-Clark. I got an email this morning. Unfortunately we did not win the first month. As you can see, they're ahead of us. So now every time I ride they're going to provide myself and our chief medical officer with a 3M cycling cap that we get to wear with pride for the next month. So we'll see if we can change that in June. Top schools, so there's universities, there's even some high schools that are getting involved in this. Communities, you might recognize some of the communities. So, at least at this point in the challenge, Madison, Wisconsin, is number one in the country. And top states, at the present time, Wisconsin is on top, but we'll see what happens. Long way to go yet. The main thing, though, is not the competition, per se. It's really becoming more active. This is a group of people, they went out to a winery. This is in the Fox Valley. On a beautiful day, just with friends. They happened to be participating in the bike challenge, but it was really about just getting out and enjoying the great weather we have in the summer. Here's another, this is actually a history ride that was done in Appleton. And they take folks around the community. So there's a lot of things that can be done on bike. This gets into the technology a bit. I find this very interesting as an engineer. But what this represents, so everyone that is using one of the apps, and this one happens to be called Strava, their rides and their routes are shown on this map, and it's called a heat map. So where it's red is where the people are riding. And what's interesting about this is it actually has practical value for folks that are designing the bicycle infrastructure, bike lanes and so forth. And I'll show you what I mean Let's zero in on Wisconsin, first of all. So these are the tracks of where people are riding in Wisconsin. You can see Milwaukee, Madison, La Crosse, up in the Fox Cities area. Zooming in on Madison, you can see some of the routes that folks are taking. And you can zoom in further and you can actually see the streets, and we can take it, I think, one more. So I'm not a cyclist in Madison so I don't know, but if you are, you might say, yeah, that's where people are riding. So it's very helpful, and we can use this data around the country to improve the bike infrastructure. Another part of this is it builds community. So we have people, a lot of the folks participating haven't ridden in a few years. This lady here, she just had a great ride. I'll just kind of skim through these. We have a few poets and what we call philosophers, I would say. This guy here lives in Hawaii, and he's always go interesting things to say. It's very interesting. So just to read what he has to say, and he's somebody out there on a bike. Just happens to be in Hawaii. Another one, this woman here, her goal is five miles, fives days a week. So it could be a pretty basic goal for some people, but she's out there and this is what she's trying to do. So, again, it's about becoming more active, and it's something that everybody can do is the message. Now what I want to do is talk a little bit about the objectives of the program. Why are we doing this? And John Burke is the CEO of Trek.

He had this to say

"The bicycle is a simple solution to the world's complex problems." And I want to go into that a little bit with you, if you're not familiar. So this graph, a lot of things going on here, but it's time on the bottom and then the percentage of the GDP that's spent on healthcare in a number of countries. We're number one. The red line is for the US. And we're spending a lot of our dollars on healthcare. So you say, okay, well, bicycling, what can it do? Just by leading a more active life and bicycling is just one way we can help to address obesity. And there's a number of diseases that are related to obesity. In our schools, so I went back to talk about Riverton, where I grew up, and we didn't have any school buses. Nobody drove their kids to school at that time. You either walked or rode your bike at that time. Today, more and more kids are getting driven to school. There's a number of reasons for that, but that's the situation. And if we look at this data from 2009, but you can see the majority of kids are not getting activity going to school. There's just a small amount that are walking or biking today. And what I want to do is take you back a few years. This happens to be Appleton. At that time, the population was just over 25,000 people. And the Appleton Police Department, at that time in 1938, went out and put together a bike safety video. So what I want to do is share a short excerpt from that, and you can see, look at how kids are getting to school at that time. It's just a lot of fun. Also, look at the faces of the kids, and see if they're having a good time here. And there'll be a little bit of music, so get ready for it.

SWING MUSIC PLAYING

He had this to say

Okay, so, you can see, in the past at least, there were a lot of people biking to work. These are thousands of kids in Appleton when our population was much smaller. One of the important things to keep in mind, biking itself, whether you bike or not, you benefit from it if we can reduce our healthcare costs. We're going to talk here a little bit about just spending and savings that can occur. This is just a graph of where our dollars are spent as an individual, and you can see that the second item on the list is transportation. So we spend a lot for transportation. A lot of information on this graph, but the key thing is 60 cents a mile is what we're spending, on average. This is published by AAA every year. And the average person is based on 15,000 miles, it's $9,000 a year. Last year I biked 4,000 miles, pretty much all to work. So at 60 cents, it's over $2,000 savings. There were some costs. I did have to buy a few tires and things like that, but it's working out for me. Not everybody can do that kind of mileage, but any kind of mileage can certainly help. We also have, our roads are getting a little more crowded, congested. And then, particularly in certain areas of the state, we have a problem with air pollution. There was a report that was done here in UW Madison's Global Health Institute, and they just made some assumptions. If half of the short trips were converted from cars to bikes, and they're looking at a five-mile round trip, so two and a half miles to and from, just during the warmest six months of the year in 11 of the largest metropolitan areas in the Upper Midwest, they calculated that there could be an estimated savings of $7 billion and primarily improved air quality, physical fitness, and then the personal savings for everyone. So there are definitely some benefits there. But to bring it back to the National Bike Challenge, again, what we would like to do is just provide an encouragement out there for people. If they want to bike, we show them, hey, there's a program here that will help you out. It's free. There's people out there that will encourage you, if you have any questions. So that's what the program is all about. What I'd like to do is end on a personal story that I've got, and I'd mentioned Riverton, New Jersey, is where I grew up. I found out just recently, I didn't know this when I was growing up, but in 1895, the New York Times had which was the most important bike race of that year. They called it the New York Times Relay. And it went from the New York Times building in New York City, and it ended up in Riverton, New Jersey. I didn't know anything about this. I didn't even know there was a track there. But it was extensively, I found over 25 articles in the New York Times and other papers of the time. So it was a pretty big deal. So I got excited, as being from Riverton and being a cyclist. Here's a photo of the actual track right there in Riverton. A very nice facility. So what I thought is pretty immediately we've got to ride this again. So I got together with some people, we organized a ride, we started at the New York Times building, it's actually changed locations, but we started from the New York Times building, and we rode back to Riverton. We were also able to raise some money and get this location, I got a historical marker put up there. But I would say the most meaningful thing, this is a shot of us at the New York Times before we, we were smiling at that time, before we road a hundred miles back to Riverton. But the most meaningful thing I got out of this is this gentleman to my left here. So when we got to Trenton, New Jersey, we still had 35 miles to go, and this guy's name is Bill Hall. He's a lifetime resident of Riverton, and he's been biking since the 1930s in the area. So he was there, and there were two other Riverton residents and rode the entire 35 miles with us back to Riverton. And I've come to find out he's 90 years old. So if I can be in any kind of shape like he is through biking, that would be just great. So, with that, let me close. Let me tell you a little bit about this photo first. So with the National Bike Challenge, it begins on May 1st at midnight. So we have a group of people in Appleton. We get together at midnight,

and at 12

01 we do what we call the midnight ride. It's only about five or six miles, but for a brief period of time we're the number on town in the United States.

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and at 12

We have a fun time, and the streets are just beautifully quiet at that time. So it's a great, great thing. I wanted to finish up and open it up to any questions you might have.

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