Application Tips for Bicycle Friendly University (BFU) Applicants

• Please review the entire application before you begin to complete the online form, particularly the open text fields, so that you are familiar with all the topics that will be covered in later question/answer options. You can review a PDF of the current BFU Application in full here. (updated 10/23/24)
   
• The Bicycle Friendly University online application now allows multiple user accounts to collaborate on a single application! To add a collaborator, click on “Manage Collaborators” in the upper right-hand corner of your online application.
   
• Returning BFU applicants whose most recent submission was submitted in 2016 or later now have the option to duplicate their previous submission in the current online form. Please find instructions to duplicate your previous BFU submission here.
   
• The BFU application is designed for colleges and universities of all types and sizes. The conditions that make your campus unique -- size, location, climate -- are important when determining how to best encourage and support bicycling, and will be taken into consideration when we review your BFU application.
   
• It is not necessary to be able to check every box on this application to earn a BFU designation. We’ve provided a comprehensive menu of all the ways a campus can be bicycle-friendly, and some options are more valuable than others, but we don’t expect any applicant to do everything on this list.
   
• Unless a question specifically asks about plans for the future, only check boxes for things that are already being done. So if most improvements for bicyclists are still in the planning stage, you can either wait a year or two before you apply to increase your chances to receive an award, or you can apply now to benchmark and watch your campus move up in award levels in the future (which can be a powerful way to show the impact of investments).
   
• If your campus is doing something that isn’t listed in the provided checkboxes, or that goes above and beyond any of the check box options on the BFU application, please tell us about it! There are many “other” checkboxes and “If other, please describe” open text fields throughout the application. If there is not an “other” box on a particular question where you would like to provide additional information, please use the bonus point question(s) at the end of the relevant ‘E’ section(s) and the ‘Final Overview’ section at the end of the application to give us more details. This not only helps us to better understand your campus, it also helps improve the BFU program by identifying new trends and best practices.
   
• Don’t be shy to tell us about your weaknesses. This gives us a more accurate snapshot of your campus, and displays that you are critically evaluating the institution’s internal efforts, which is an important component of the final ‘E’, Evaluation & Planning.