What is Let's Move LI?
A collaboration among municipalities, schools, businesses and other organizations to promote active transportation across Long Island.
Our Goals
- Promote walking and biking, alone or connected to public transit
- Encourage bike and pedestrian safety education for students
- Support safe walkability and biking infrastructure
Benefits of Active Transportation
Walking and biking can provide many health, environmental, social/safety and economic benefits.
Get Involved
1. Promote the Benefits of Active Transportation
Start promoting the benefits of Active Transportation to your residents, students or employees on your website, email, newsletters and social media. Our Toolkit makes it easy with sample copy, flyers and logos. .
2. Host an Educational Event
Host an educational event either virtually or in person to promote the many benefits of Active Transportation, and build awareness about nearby walkable downtowns and recreational bike trails. Let's Move LI volunteers can help you organize the event.
3. Develop an Active Transportation Plan
Ready for the next step? Form a committee to develop and implement an Active Transportation Plan to encourage your residents, students or employees to walk and bike. Our Spotlights page can give you ideas of active transportation initiatives in other communities. Also, check out our Resources page for information on the many Long Island resources that can help!
JULY 2022 SPOTLIGHT
Vision Long Island & AARP Long Island
Vision Long Island and AARP Long Island recently teamed with community influencers and officials to conduct two outdoor walkability audits in the Village of Hempstead and Brentwood. Vision LI and AARP’s have collaborated for several years helping to assess community walkability.
Led by Vision Long Island Placemaking Director Elissa Kyle, the audits help identify scarcity of sidewalks, heavy traffic, multilane roadways that are unsafe to cross, and lack of street and sidewalk maintenance that discourage or outright prevent people from walking. With the help of AARP volunteers, the audits help increase exercise opportunities for our communities and boost social interaction among neighbors.
This AARP Long Island collaboration is part of AARP’s broader Livable/Age-Friendly Communities initiative. “Too many communities, especially on Long Island, are designed exclusively or almost exclusively for automobile travel, with very little consideration given to the needs of pedestrians of all ages,” explained Bernard Macias, AARP NY Associate State Director for Long Island.
Vision Long Island works with communities to assess the walkability of their streets through walk audits and make formal recommendations for improvements. They advocate for funding to help implement improvements to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure at the state, county and local level. In addition, Vision Long Island holds an annual Long Island Complete Streets Summit to bring advocates, engineers, residents, business owners and government together to plan and rebuild Long Island's dangerous roadways.
Vision Long Island and AARP have plans to team on two additional walkability audits in September during LI Mobility Week.
For additional information contact:
Elissa Kyle - ew@visionlongisland.org
Bernard Macias -bmacias@aarp.org
AARP Livable Communities website: https://www.aarp.org/livable-communities/
