By Cole Villena

At Walk Bike Nashville, we work every day to make our city more walkable, bikeable, and livable. Throughout 2025, we debuted new ways to share our message, set participation records for one of our oldest programs, hosted our most ambitious Open Streets yet, and made memories with our community of over 900 members.

Read on to learn about our impact in 2025, then join us to keep our momentum rolling forward in 2026.

Our Community Rallies for a Better East Bank Boulevard

We spent a lot of 2025 banging the drum for a safe, four-lane design for East Bank Boulevard. Our argument is simple: The Boulevard can be Nashville’s next great street in its next great neighborhood, so project leaders should build it for all people, not just people in cars.

We’re inspired by our members’ relentless advocacy for this cause throughout the year. In April, we helped mobilize 150 in-person meeting attendees and 607 survey respondents to call for a four-lane design at a community meeting. When the East Bank team asked for community input through a survey, Nashvillians spoke loudly and clearly — by a margin of over 60 to 1! — to support four lanes rather than six.

We met with the East Bank team multiple times in 2025 and shared our feedback directly with them. The project is currently on pause, and they plan to include us in more conversations going forward. As the fight for a better East Bank Boulevard continues, we know Nashvillians will continue to speak out.

1,134 Riders of All Kinds Take on Tour de Nash

Tour de Nash, presented by LDA Engineering, is one of our most visible events each year, and our 21st running drew 1,134 registered riders to our three routes. It was one of our largest rides yet, and people from across the spectrum of Nashville’s cycling community gathered to celebrate, explore, and ride. We were especially excited to welcome blind tandem cycling teams assembled by Achilles Nashville. Reporter Chris Harris of WSMV produced a great story about these uniquely collaborative riding teams — check it out!

Even better: This year’s 5-Mile City Tour ran along our car-lite Open Streets Summer Series route. This built on the combined Tour de Nash and Open Streets concept we debuted in 2024, and it introduced hundreds of riders to urban cycling for the first time.

Inaugural State of Our Streets Report Calls for Transportation Action

Advocacy has been at the heart of what we do since we were founded in 1998. This year, we debuted a new way to shape Nashville’s transportation landscape with State of Our Streets. The context document and action plan spelled out six short-term solutions to lay a foundation for the city’s mobility future, from improving bikeshare service to speeding up the pace at which we build safe walking paths.

We’ve already seen progress on several of our recommendations, and we’re hard at work advocating for the rest! Look out for our next State of Our Streets report later this year.

Open Streets Summer Series Welcomes Nashvillians to Downtown, Car-Free

Open Streets events are one of our favorite ways to demonstrate the power of people-first, car-free spaces. This year, we hosted our largest Open Street ever across a five-mile downtown route — and we did it three months in a row!

The Open Streets Summer Series, presented by the Nashville Department of Transportation & Multimodal Infrastructure (NDOT) and Amazon, welcomed hundreds of Nashvillians to downtown, where they connected with friends, checked out local businesses and community organizations, and enjoyed a day in our largest form of public space: our streets. Check out Open Streets Coordinator Calah Gipson’s recap blog for more about the Summer Series’ sights and sounds, and stay tuned for more exciting announcements on the future of Open Streets…

Paragon Mills Elementary School Provides for Students in a New Way with a Walking School Bus

Paragon Mills Elementary School has long demonstrated a people-first approach to transportation, especially through their annual Ruby Bridges Walk to School Day. In May 2025, we worked with them to launch a Walking School Bus and show how street-level organizing can make streets safer in entirely new ways. As Executive Director Meredith Montgomery said at our Streets for People Awards ceremony:

When the flurry of traffic stops filled our community with fear, attendance plummeted in South Nashville schools, and parents were scared to leave their homes. Within 48 hours, Paragon Mills organized their passionate teachers and a few volunteers to lead three walking school bus routes to and from school, five days a week. Within a couple days, we had over 100 kids participating.

Paragon Mills didn’t let a lack of sidewalks get in their way, or the delay of a traffic calming project — they leaned on their culture of care and community to make their neighborhood more walkable, which is an inspiration to us all.

Paragon Mills won our Organization of the Year Award at the 2025 Streets for People Member Party & Awards. Learn more about the other award winners here!

Open Streets Community Guide and Toolkit Makes It Easier to Host a Car-Free Event in Your Neighborhood

Ever wanted to host your own Open Street? We made it easier than ever in 2025 with the Open Streets Community Guide and Toolkit. The guide, produced in partnership with NDOT, walks you through the entire process, from your earliest ideas to the big day. It includes examples and case studies, links to important documents, and ideas on how to make your event a great fit for your neighborhood.

Nashville neighbors have already shown their appetite for car-free streets across the city, and we were happy to see neighbor-led open streets in Paragon Mills and on Antioch Pike. NDOT issued 41 street closure permits on October 31 alone, giving neighbors an easy, highly impactful way to level up their Halloween celebrations in 2025.

Schools Countywide Join Our Biggest Walk to School Day Ever

Nashville became one of the first cities to celebrate Walk to School Day (then known as “Walk Our Children to School Day”) when Walk Bike Nashville hosted the event in 1999. The event is a huge part of our history, which is why we were so excited to host the largest edition ever in 2025! Thousands of students participated across 68 registered schools, and our staff witnessed the joy of the day firsthand at Robert Churchwell Museum Magnet Elementary School and Whitsitt Elementary School.

The event didn’t just introduce students to car-free, active transportation methods. It also showed a clear desire for better walking paths near these schools; in our post-event surveys, the majority of schools specifically wrote that they wanted more sidewalks to make walking to school safer both on Walk to School Day and year-round.

Streets for People Framework Opens a New Chapter

How do we make better streets? What’s the best way to maximize our impact in Nashville? And how do we know whether we’re actually achieving our goals?

These are big questions that cut to the heart of our work at Walk Bike Nashville. In December, we concluded a yearlong strategic planning process and launched our Streets for People Framework, which outlines our vision for better streets and a strong culture of walking and biking. Creating this document was a huge, rewarding undertaking, and it sets us up for many more years of building a more walkable, bikeable, and livable Nashville.

We also hope it’s a useful resource for you to learn more about our work — and how you can get involved. Visit walkbikenashville.org/framework to read the Framework today.

Member Memo Provides Monthly Advocacy Updates and Transportation News

If we want to build better streets in Nashville, we need to stay informed about the ever-changing transportation landscape in our city. Throughout 2025, we provided our members with updates through Member Memo, an exclusive monthly newsletter that provides meeting recaps, upcoming advocacy opportunities, and much more.

Our goal is to make Member Memo the most comprehensive source of Nashville transportation news out there, and we’re excited to continue it in 2026. If you want to stay informed — and if you want a host of other benefits including discounted WeGo QuickTickets and Tour de Nash registration — become a member today!

Nashvillians Choose Car-Free Transportation Options

One of our organization’s objectives is to provide programs and services that reduce car dependency. One way we measure our success is to track the number of people riding the bus, using bikeshare services, and joining our movement as members.

The numbers told an encouraging story in 2025. WeGo Transit ridership grew 4.6 percent year-over-year, according to an August report, and our Walk Bike Bus Pass Members took thousands of rides in 2025. Lime reported a 300 percent year-over-year increase in bikeshare ridership near transit locations, and BCycle posted its second highest monthly ridership in two years in September 2025.

While we’d never claim that these gains are entirely due to our programs, we’re proud to provide our members with benefits that make it easier to choose car-free transportation options more often. Paid members at the Strider tier and above can purchase discounted WeGo Transit QuickTickets and BCycle annual passes, and we’re always advocating to expand these programs citywide.

Thanks for an amazing year!