It’s Not Just a Bike Ride
Ride for Your Life Madison - October 4, 2026
Ride for Your Life is so much more than a bike ride. It’s an advocacy event that will help make our streets safer for bicyclists, pedestrians, and drivers. Let me explain why.
My wife, Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, was killed four years ago riding her bike. She was riding home from our kids’ elementary school in August 2022 when a truck driver turned his truck into her – and over her.
Losing any loved one is traumatizing. Losing one in a preventable traffic crash adds anger to the mix. I very soon realized that her death was anything but an “accident.” It was a crash that, in addition to being the result of catastrophic negligence, was a policy failure–a failure to address known dangers with policies to create better roads, better drivers, better cars, better speeds, and better post-crash care.
I organized the first Ride for Your Life just after Sarah died in Washington, D.C. Nearly 2,000 people rode and walked with us to the lawn of the U.S. Congress to demand change. My congressman, Jamie Raskin, and others pledged to sponsor legislation named after Sarah. My local representatives in Maryland did the same. Now, after three years of advocating, we are responsible for two bills in Congress that have a real chance of passing, two laws in Maryland, and more.
Wisconsin and Massachusetts are next.
On October 4, 2026 hundreds of us will participate in Ride for Your Life Madison. It’s going to be an amazing day, and we hope you’ll be there. As you can see, this is not just a bike ride. We don’t just ride to raise awareness. This is advocacy, linked to concrete, life-saving policy that we intend to pass.
As any event organizer knows, getting butts on bikes is hard. This ride adds on to that challenge. We get legislators to commit to showing up and to sponsoring policy. We get victims’ families integrally involved. We organize a rally at an iconic location. We give folks an easy on-ramp to activism. And we don’t give up after the event.
We named this movement Ride for Your Life because it was not just about Sarah. The year she was killed, more than 42,000 people died on our roads in America. We hit the all-time high of cyclists killed, and a forty year high of pedestrians that year. This had to be about all of us.
This year’s ride is dedicated to 17-year-old Sasha Rosen, an ebullient and promising Madison West High School Senior killed crossing South Park Street in February. Sasha was killed by a speeding driver allegedly going 62 miles per hour in a 25 per mile an hour speed zone–a speed that is so out of bounds it makes you curse.
What do you do with speeders of this sort? First, you call them what they are –”super speeders.” These are people going 30 miles an hour over the speed limit, racing, and racking up multiple speeding tickets. They are many times more likely than the average person to kill or seriously injure others on our roads. Stats also show that more than 75% of drivers who get their licences suspended continue to drive anyway.
That fact is why you do the second thing: pass Sasha’s bill. Spearheaded by a national organization called Families for Safe Streets, this ingenious legislation is taking off across America. It requires that a person who is convicted of a second excessive speeding or reckless driving offense to get an “intelligent speed assistance” (ISA) device in their car. The device is a GPS-enabled speed limiter that doesn’t allow them to go over the speed limit.
While it definitely curbs the speeding, it still allows the person to get to work and conduct other daily activities. This bill would apply only to the small group of drivers who have already demonstrated that they will not follow the limit on their own. The offender pays the cost, alleviating budgetary issues. The state can pay the negligible cost for those who can’t pay.
Speed is a huge issue for Wisconsin. It has the second-highest share of drivers with a speeding ticket on their record of any state. In 2025, speed played a role in 166 deadly crashes and 4,538 injuries here, according to the State Department of Transportation.
I have the benefit of knowing this legislation well because we passed it in Maryland following our Ride for Your Life last year.
Our event made all the difference: Legislators felt the force of our constituency. We got them to commit to shepherding the bill to passage. The press and public heard our arguments and saw the size of our peloton, nearly half a mile long. And when hearings for the bill came up, we were there to testify and to push back on forces who tried to weaken the bill. They didn’t succeed.
Here in Wisconsin, Rep. Russell Goodwin and Sen. Chris Larson have agreed to introduce the bill in January and we aim to have Republican co-sponsorship, as well. Eight states and Washington, D.C., have passed similar legislation: Virginia, Washington, Maryland, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, and Arizona. In six states – Georgia, Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa and Tennessee – the lead sponsors of ISA legislation were Republicans.
That’s not all we’ll do Oct 4. This year we will ask folks to participate in an effort by the League of American Bicyclists – one of our partners – to save federal bike (and pedestrian) funding from cuts. See their action alert here. The U.S. spends less than one percent of the federal transportation budget on bike lanes, but there is an effort to cut even these programs. We want members of Congress to vote against any proposals that would do that.
On Oct. 4, we’ll move on foot and bike from Brittingham Park to the State Capitol. We’ll be riding not just for Sarah, Sasha, and others who have been impacted by traffic violence. We’ll be riding for you.
Join us Sunday, October 4, 2026!
Registration is free.
Volunteers are appreciated.
Donations are welcomed.
rideforyourlife.org
Read a powerful Op-Ed from Sasha’s mother, Nadya, to understand why Ride for Your Life and your participation is so important.
Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, a Wisconsin native, was from Oconomowoc. Her sister, Alicia Bosscher, a board member with Madison Bikes, organized the 2023 Ride for Your Life and is on the organizing committee this year.
The photo at the top of this newspost features the Debbink Family at the 2023 Ride for Your Life rally in Madison.
