OBS 2017 Recap
RECAP: The 2017 Ontario Bike Summit
Click here to view the "OBS17 At a Glance" Event Overview
Click here to view the 2017 agenda
The 9th Annual Ontario Bike Summit took place on Tuesday, April 11th and Wednesday, April 12th, 2017. The event once again took place at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Toronto and featured speakers from across North America who are looking at cycling's role in urban mobility and community building. With over 290 delegates, the 2017 Summit was the biggest Ontario Bike Summit yet - showing the interest across the province as we work to build a more Bicycle Friendly Ontario.
Summit highlights included:
- A 26% increase in participation from 2016, with over 290 delegates (wow!)
- 32 speakers discussing strategies to "Just Add Bikes" and our core summit themes of advocacy best practices, partnership building, cycling and complete streets and risk management
- Keynote addresses delivered by The Honourable Eleanor McMahon, Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport; The Honourable Steven Del Duca, Minister of Transportation; Todd Scott, Executive Director of the Detroit Greenways Coalition; and Julie Sawchuk, Change-Maker in Huron County
- 9 members of the Queen's Park All Party Cycling Caucus at our Keynote Dinner, and 5 Cabinet Ministers at the summit overall
- Youth Emcees Anna Posthill and Geoffrey Le leading the summit and representing CultureLink Canada
- A bike tour of local infrastructure led by staff from the City of Toronto with bikes from Toronto Bike Share
- Municipal leadership panel looking at "Why Cycling Matters to Communities" moderated by the Canadian Automobile Association
- Launch of Share the Road's 1m safe passing law awareness campaign and sharing strategies for enforcing the law from Share the Road
The Ontario Bike Summit provides a forum for decision-makers to be inspired by best practices from around Ontario and beyond, to gain the practical skills necessary to act on that inspiration and to build new connections to learn from the growing network of people interested in making Ontario the best place in Canada to ride a bike. For a summary of past summits: