Roxanne De Beaux is a highly skilled, energetic and enduring cycling advocate who has been making a difference in her adopted home town of Cambridge, UK.

As the first employee and later CEO of Camcycle – the Cambridge Cycling Campaign, Roxy spent a decade building the capacity of the organisation. Staff grew from one to seven and income increased approximately 10 fold.

Meanwhile Camcycle achieved some major “concrete” achievements in and around the university city of Cambridge. One major piece in this puzzle, the Chisholm Trail, took no less than 20 years of campaigning to bring into reality.

In our interview with Roxanne, she shares many great insights into how to build an effective organisation.

Roxanne has also been a co-organiser of the Active Travel Café – a vibrant online meeting place for a wide range of people across the UK.

She accepted an invitation to become a Board Trustee of Cycling UK – one of the largest and oldest national cycling organisations in the world.

All of these activities were coming to a conclusion at the time of our interview because Roxanne is about to move back to her home town of Perth, Western Australia to take up an important State Government transport role. We wonder if the WA establishment is ready for the whirlwind of energy and ideas that is about to blow in their direction!

What’s Up?

Towards the end of each episode, Sara and Phil share news of the day and events they’ve been taking part in.

In this episode Sara shares about a ground-breaking project carried out in the western suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales. It involved giving a diverse group of previously non-cycling women subsidised access to e-bikes, skills training and other support, then monitoring and reporting upon their changes in travel habits.

This link takes you to a YouTube video of the evaluation report launch:  Transforming transport in Western Sydney

Unfortunately the audio in that video is not ideal.

Here’s a link via which you can download a .pdf of the report itself

Meanwhile, Phil honoured two leading active transport planners, Riley O’Neil and Louisa Gag, located in Chicago and Boston respectively, who were both tragically killed by motorists in separate incidents barely one month apart. Both were riding their bicycles at the time, either to or from work.

Streetsblog Chicago’s long-time writer, John Greenfield wrote this excellent article honouring the two young experts who were making a difference in their cities.

Greenfield calls for their deaths to become a turning point in the ongoing battle for safe streets.

The article also contains many links where you can see more specific stories about the lives of Riley and Louisa and reports of events that have been held in their honour.