2025 Year in Review

Happy new year! As we look forward to 2026, we're taking time to pause and reflect on the work we did over the past year — and to set the course for the year ahead.

2025 was a landmark year for bicycling in The Woodlands. Our community was named the number #1 community in Texas for biking by People for Bikes based on the quality and connectedness of our community's bike network. Additionally, we were named a Bike-Friendly Silver Community for the first time by the League of American Bicyclists, the leading national nonprofit bike advocacy organization. The League status is based on a community survey and a lengthy application prepared by local officials (in our case, The Woodlands Township), and The Woodlands is now the League's highest-rated community in the State of Texas and the only community to earn the Silver status. The Bike-Friendly Silver designation is an especially meaningful achievement for our organization: We were founded in 2009 to help promote policy and infrastructure improvements that could lead to League recognition. The Woodlands has been Bike-Friendly Bronze since 2010 and this improved status is major recognition of the good work that has been done in our community. The league's report card for The Woodlands offered detailed feedback on what we're doing well and how we might do even better; we were impressed with the specific recommendations that call out opportunities for fostering collaboration with local government and businesses and advancing existing initiatives like the 2016 Bike Pedestrian Master Plan. 

For our part, we were proud to contribute to this bicycle-friendly community in several ways this year. We created our first-ever scholarship program: We invited children in grades 3-8 to write essays describing what a bike-friendly community meant to them. A panel of community members and Bike The Woodlands board members reviewed these essays and selected grade-level winners and honorable mentions, and our grand prize winner was a fourth-grader from Sally K. Ride Elementary, who won a donut party for her class and a $100 gift card.

We also continued our bike recycling program: During 2025, we collected more than 900 bikes, diverting scrap metal from landfills and fixing up bikes to distribute to people in need. We're grateful for the amazing support of our partners, including Recycled Cycles of Texas, Southern Elite, CASA of Montgomery County, Interfaith of The Woodlands, and The Woodlands Township. We also helped support local bike events, including school-based bike rodeos in the spring and the Trek Store The Woodlands annual Christmas Light Ride in the fall. And we helped plan and lead our community's tenth-annual Bike Month throughout the month in May, leading village rides, creating new workshops, and promoting new ways to get involved with biking in our community. We have great partnerships with our local bike shops and we're grateful for our relationships with our local government officials, staff members, and citizen advocates who help us advance our mission and understand community needs.

We're also proud of our ongoing advocacy work in the community. A major issue this year was the rise of electronic micromobility devices (EMDs) on our pathways and roadways, and Bike The Woodlands board members were actively engaged in making public comments and sharing our perspective at Township Board of Directors meetings about this issue. Our board members also appeared in videos for the Township's "Respect the Path" social media campaign that promoted safe pathway usage.

 The e-scooters and e-motorcycles on the pathways continue to be a problem. Meanwhile, the notion that higher-speed pathway users need a safe place to travel gained more traction with board members, and the Board of Directors approved funding to address another one of our organization's signature concerns: jutting curbs that impede travel on the shoulders on Lake Woodlands Drive between Lake Front Drive and Kuykendahl Road. While these improvements on Lake Woodlands is not yet the striped or separated bike lane recommended by the 2016 Bike Pedestrian Master Plan, it is a major step toward improved mobility for roadway users. We're excited about this investment in safer riding in our community. (If you really want to get in the weeds about the state of our roadway shoulders, you can review our inventories of roadway shoulders and hazards on our website. And if you'd like to help update these inventories, read on below about how to sign up as a volunteer!)

We also worked to better build community through bicycling. We hosted a meeting in February 2025 to learn more about issues facing trail users in our region, and we were grateful to have representatives from Harris County Precinct 3, The Woodlands Township, GHORBA, Bayou Land Conservancy, and more to help us better understand local needs. We hosted an Opt Outside ride on the day after Thanksgiving (inspired by REI's campaign with the same name) that featured a guided pathway ride and a mountain bike ride. We also retooled Bike The Woodlands Day in May to feature three ride options (pathways, trails, and roads) departing from the Rob Fleming Recreation Center. We're eager to better understand and support all the ways that people ride bikes in our region, and we hope to more effectively advocate for policies and improvements that help all riders. 

As an organization, we're proud of our growth this year. We now have ten board members with an extraordinary range of experiences and interests, and their expertise is helping us grow and develop as an organization that will effectively nurture and support our evolving cycling community. 

We're mindful of a major improvement we need to make: We need to more effectively engage with our volunteers. Each year, people express an interest in getting involved, and, frankly, we haven't had clear on-ramps for people to get involved or consistent activities to engage them. Improving volunteer engagement is a major priority for us this year. We're eager to get community members' feedback on how they'd like to get involved with us, and we're also working to improve how we put our volunteers to work.

On that note, if you're interested in getting involved as a volunteer with us, please fill out our volunteer survey here. 

We've also heard from people who are interested in joining or leading more local rides. If this interests you, please fill out our local ride survey here. 

Thank you for reading and thank you for being part of our work in 2025: We're grateful that we have the opportunity to build a better community through bicycling with our neighbors in this beautiful place we call home. 

Sending you sincere best wishes for safe and joyful riding in 2026.

Warm regards,

Sarah Freeman, CT Gooding, Richard Lamb, John Martin, Tricia Monticello Kievlan, Mike Pilkenton, Mariana Raschke, Cynthia Ullman, Yan Wang, and John Zgourides
Bike The Woodlands Coalition Board of Directors