Have you ever tried to ride your bike to work in the summer? If you’re like me — or Jim from the office — you may have arrived at work covered in sweat:
The Atlantic Cities recently tackled this problem, pointing out that it might be helpful for employers to provide showers for employees. The article notes that showers are frequently overlooked, but make a big difference. The article also calls on cities to think about how cyclists behave after they reach their destinations:
Bicycle commuting is a complex behavior that needs multiple layers of policy encouragement to thrive. Cities that aim to increase their share of cyclists have taken a good first step in creating the infrastructure that gets them from their home to their office. Those that wish to do more should consider measures that get bike riders from their office to their desk.
Provo is a particularly good place for some sort of “policy encouragement” along these lines because while it’s warm in the summer, it’s not prohibitively hot as it is in places like Arizona. The result is that more people in Provo could bike if there were better amenities at their workplaces.
(pro(vo)cation) 
We have a large contingent who bike to Bluehost and showers at the office make it considerably more manageable to conciously commute and maintain an air of professionalism.
That’s awesome! I’d love to talk to someone over there sometime about that.
First time to disagree with you. Government needs to stay away from forcing businesses to provide showers on-site. It’s insane. First help fix the part about getting government to allow businesses to even be built within walking/biking distance to residential areas. Then businesses will figure out how to implement stuff like showers at the workplace to keep their employees happy. Stop the insanity of over regulation.
Thats a really good point. I could see how something like requiring businesses to offer showers would make it more expensive to have a business, and therefore simply harder to have a business. And then the economy suffers.
What I’m thinking of in terms of policy encouragement is more along the lines of incentives. So, for example, the city recently had grants for downtown businesses to refurbish their store fronts. Perhaps a similar grant program would work. Or maybe the incentives wouldn’t even need to be financial — they could be some sort of municipal recognition (sort of like LEED certification for buildings, which doesn’t necessarily make the building more economically powerful, but is nevertheless a highly sought after gold star).
Or maybe none of these ideas would work. I don’t really know, but it’d be a shame, as you say, to increase regulations and thus doom businesses.