YIPPY!!!!! Freiker Fever comes to Omaha!

It's a wonderful day here at Activate Omaha! Our dream of bringing Freiker to Omaha has finally come true, thanks to a grant from Safe Routes Nebraska!!

What is Freiker? It is short for "FREquent bIKER," and it is a cool system that tracks the number of kids that walk and ride to school, and then provides incentives to kids as they reach their walking/riding goals. The heart of the system is the Freikometer, which is a weather proof, tamper proof, solar powered scanner that reads an RFID tag that is attached to the student's backpack. The machine uploads the data wirelessly to the Freiker website, where people can get real-time results on the number of kids who have walked or biked to school. (Below: the "before and after" effect that Freiker had on an elementary school.)

Yes, it is hard to explain...and let me potentially confuse our readers even more by saying that Freiker recently re-branded itself since our grant application was written, and is now known as

"Boltage," with the Freikometer now known as the Zapper. While the program started out to encourage biking, they expanded it for walking, necessitating the name change.

At any rate, Activate Omaha staff saw this program in action during a visit to Boulder in 2008, and were amazed at what we saw at Crestview Elementary: on a chilly 38* morning, 66 kids rolled up on their bikes. Combine that with the number of kids that walked, and there was very little vehicular traffic around the school. It was incredible. Check out this time lapse slide show of Boulder's Crestview Elementary from the Boltage website to see for yourself. (Holy bike parking, Batman!)

Our funding will allow us to put this program into action at 3 Omaha schools. The search will begin immediately to find the schools that will be the best fit for this, with the plan of having it up and running for Fall 2010!

Stay tuned as we begin this awesome journey!