The way Luke Hoffman handled a brush with death says a lot about how he approaches life.
Hoffman is director of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition, a statewide assemblage of cycling interests whose agenda for 2025 is topped by an all-out push to win passage of long-sought legislation requiring that drivers’ use of communications devices like cellphones be hands-free while they’re at the wheel. The goal: reining in distracted driving, the cause of an average of nine fatal accidents a day in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Which makes what happened to Hoffman last June particularly ironic.
Luke Hoffman, executive director of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition, prepares for an evening ride from Des Moines to Norwalk with allies and supporters.
Hoffman, one of the Des Moines Register’s 15 People to Watch in 2025, was on the route inspection pre-ride for the 2024 edition of the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, preparing to climb a hill 19 miles outside Knoxville. He was hugging the white line on the right edge of a county road when he heard a vehicle coming up behind him.
The other riders in the group were “a baseball toss” ahead of him, he said. He recalled that he signaled the driver to pass him and wondered why the two-door pickup didn’t move faster to do so.
The truck instead swerved toward Hoffman, and its passenger side mirror smacked him across the left shoulder blade. He said he briefly lost his balance and was sideswiped by the truck.
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The truck, its mirror dangling by a wire, continued on as though the driver wasn’t aware of the collision. Hoffman somehow managed to regain control of his bike.
“I never fell. And that was probably what saved my life,” he said.
But he was angry at the driver and in shock and pain from the massive bruising that would soon cover his back.
“He was still going, and I yelled at him,” he said, adding sheepishly, “I used one of those words you use in a situation like that.”
The driver pulled over and climbed out with a small dog in tow. Apologizing profusely, he explained that the dog had jumped on him, causing a distraction that drew his attention off the road.
“I was just like, ‘I’m lucky to be alive right now,'” Hoffman recalled.
And then he did what he does: Lobbied for his cause — the safety of cyclists.
“I’m mad at you, but let me just educate you for a second,” he told the young man, launching a plea for drivers to maintain safe distance when passing people on bikes. “Can you please give a full lane, if not a full lane, at least 3 feet, if you can manage 6, that’d be great. … Can you please do that next time?”
Hoffman loves to ride, but that the accident had left him so shaken he questioned — briefly — whether it was worth the risk.
“In that moment I lost so much joy because, you know, I could have died from this,” he said. “But I also gained so much purpose because I was like, I can look at this one of two ways. I can take this so personally and let a negative experience dictate how I look at the rest of my life, or the learned lesson I can take from it is: I’m the lucky one, and I owe it to everybody else who’s not as lucky to be a champion for these issues with my entire soul.”
Luke Hoffman’s early years: Experiencing poverty, finding a calling
There are deep roots to the organizational acumen and evangelical fervor Hoffman brings to the job that he took in October 2023.
He was the oldest of four children and said it often fell to him to keep his siblings in harmony during tough times. And in his early years, the times were indeed tough.
He was born in the tiny southwest Iowa town of Thurman, the son of a truck driver and a teacher. His father longed to be a pastor and eventually joined the ministry of the Assemblies of God denomination.
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For several years, the family moved from small Iowa town to small Iowa town as the elder Hoffman took a series of posts that paid so little his son recalls having to depend on a nonprofit for Christmas presents one year. The family of six also lived for a period in a cramped trailer provided by one of the churches, unable to afford anything more suitable.
“It was definitely something that stuck with me, that we went from being sort of low middle class to being in poverty,” Hoffman said.
Ultimately choosing the welfare of his own flock over the Lord’s, his father moved the family to the Omaha, Nebraska, area, where they had extended family, and went back to truck driving. Homeschooled to that point by his mother, Hoffman said he enrolled in Bellevue East High.
He became an avid member of the speech and debate teams, spending every weekend of the school year at competitions. He said his forensics teacher, John Campbell, became his model for “intellectual curiosity” and engagement, and he recalled one episode that especially shaped his outlook.
It came as Campbell was skillfully engaging another student in a debate-like exchange. Hoffman paid rapt attention, but some other students were chattering among themselves.
“He actively stopped class because a few people were not paying attention and he said, ‘You guys can just leave. Just go hang out in the hall. I’ll write you a hall pass. You’re distracting from an honestly good conversation. And if there’s something better than a good conversation, let me know when you find it.’
“And I was like, that is how I want to approach life,” Hoffman said. “Be here, be present, be intellectually present in your own time.”
Campbell said he recalled Hoffman as “being one of the most earnest students I’ve ever encountered. He was incredibly honest and direct.”
Hoffman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public policy at the University of Nebraska Omaha and, unlike debate and speech teammates who went on to be lawyers and corporate lobbyists, found himself attracted to nonprofits. He worked for United Way of the Heartland, then the Greater Omaha Chamber, organizing civic efforts and learning how to connect people and groups around causes.
In what Iowa Bicycle Coalition director Luke Hoffman says is his favorite photo, he poses at age 6 with his father, preparing to throw away his no-longer-needed training wheels.
Also during that time, he rekindled a childhood love of cycling. (His favorite photo is of him at age 6 with his father, a big grin on his face as he holds his bike’s training wheels over a trash can, ready to discard them because he doesn’t need them anymore.) He spent his time off riding on the Wabash Trace Nature Trail, which extends from Council Bluffs to the Missouri border. He also joined his first RAGBRAI team and has ridden annually ever since.
Long fascinated by the Iowa caucuses, he jumped at an opportunity to work on a campaign in Des Moines in 2020, then took on the task of directing another campaign, aimed at passing a renewal of the Polk County Land & Legacy bond issue. It would provide $65 million over 10 years for projects including bike and water trails and improved water quality.
Emphasizing the latter — “vote for clean water, because nobody’s against that” — and assembling a coalition that ranged from grassroots groups to major corporations, Hoffman helped win approval of the bond from 81% of voters.
It was a surprising victory at a time when complaints about rising property taxes were becoming increasingly common, and it led to his hiring as director of Iowa Rivers, a paddling safety and water trails group. Then one day, he said, his girlfriend, Alicia Vasto, spotted an ad for the Iowa Bicycle Coalition, which was seeking to fill the post being vacated by the retirement of its founding director, Mark Wyatt.
“She saw it and said, ‘Oh, Luke, you got to look at this. This is so you!'”
It seems like Luke Hoffman is everywhere: ‘His energy is infectious’
Iowa Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Luke Hoffman, right, speaks with state Rep. Thomas Gerhold, a Benton County Republican, at the Iowa Capitol.
It was a natural fit, he said, and placed him on a bigger stage. Iowa has its avid paddlers, but as the home of RAGBRAI, the world’s largest, oldest annual bike tour, it has a vast, year-round cycling community.
The Des Moines metro has hundreds of miles of trails in an expanding network, and cities including Ames, Iowa City and Cedar Rapids are adding to theirs, too. Iowa also has more than 80 bike specialty stores.
In his first year on the job, Hoffman seemed to be everywhere: riding the trails to meet riders, participating in RAGBRAI, manning booths for his group at events like the Iowa Bike Expo, visiting every bike shop in the state and drumming up participation in the annual fundraising rides that the coalition sponsors. He also found time to network at bike-friendly watering holes and traded his bike jersey for a suit and tie to lobby at the Iowa Capitol.
“His energy is infectious,” said Kyle Robberts, who met Hoffman in the elevator of the Des Moines apartment building where both lived. An IT manager, Robberts is the former director of a suicide prevention group and runs a website, dsmbiking.com, that he hopes will become an information clearinghouse for users of Des Moines metro trails.
Luke Hoffman, left, executive director of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition, meets with a chief legislative ally, state Sen. Mark Lofgren, a Burlington-area Republican, before a Des Moines-to-Norwalk bike ride.
Robberts, attending a meeting of the coalition in October, said Hoffman’s extroverted personality is ideal for his line of work.
Hoffman “understood right off that it’s the connections you make that make nonprofits run,” Robberts said. “Knitting groups together, the massive variety of people. I don’t think anyone’s here because they feel obligated. It’s because they’re excited.”
Under Hoffman, the coalition also has gotten behind an effort to build a massive indoor BMX facility and skatepark in the Des Moines metro. Bobby Kennedy of the Street Collective, a Des Moines nonprofit that advocates for safe transportation and runs an East Village store that offers lessons in bike repair, is helping lead the drive with Kittie Weston-Knauer, a Des Moines resident who holds the distinction of being the nation’s oldest female BMX competitor.
Kennedy said that when he sought to enlist Hoffman’s help with a feasibility study, “Luke didn’t just say, ‘Let’s go.’ He shouted it: ‘LET’S GO!'”
Pursuing an elusive goal: A hands-free law for phone use while driving
State Sen. Mark Lofgren and Luke Hoffman ride into Norwalk during an evening bike ride on Thursday, Oct. 11, 2024.
Hoffman scored a win during the 2024 Iowa legislative session, helping secure passage of a bill that added bicycles, skateboarders, wheelchair users and others with “wheeled conveyances” to the definition of those to whom drivers must yield in crosswalks.
To overcome the opposition that had scuttled the effort in a previous session, he lobbied for it as he visited a variety of influential Iowans, including Tiffany Tauscheck, head of the Greater Des Moines Partnership business leaders group. He said Tauscheck told him she was glad he was pursuing the bill, and she recounted the terrifying experience of a friend whose stroller was hit by a car in a crosswalk, sending it and the baby airborne (the child — “miraculously,” as Hoffman put it — was unharmed).
From then on, he said, as with the clean water theme of the conservation bond, he and others pushing the bill adopted a mantra: “It’s about mothers and babies, mothers and babies, mothers and babies.”
Securing passage of the hands-free bill poses an even steeper challenge, although 30 states and the District of Columbia have such laws on the books, he said, and research has consistently shown that the laws reduce fatalities among cyclists and pedestrians. But the proposed Iowa law has been before the Legislature six times without success, he acknowledged, despite having the backing of the Iowa Department of Public Safety and other law enforcement groups across the state, as well major employers.
According to Hoffman, Gov. Kim Reynolds told a bike coalition volunteer at the crosswalk bill signing ceremony that she didn’t understand why hands-free wasn’t a law yet.
Those lobbying for it have included the parents of Ellen Bengtson, a 28-year-old Charles City chemical engineer who was struck and killed while cycling by a driver who admitted he’d been looking at his phone. The driver was charged with reckless homicide by vehicle, but the judge dismissed the case because of Iowa’s lack of a statute clearly outlawing hands-on phone use, other than texting, by drivers.
The hands-free legislation won passage in the Iowa Senate last year, garnering just three no votes. But it never got to the floor of the House. Lobbyists blame reluctance to embrace regulation and an unwillingness among the GOP House leadership to let a bill be introduced unless there’s sufficient support among their fellow Republicans to ensure its passage without needing to rely on Democratic votes.
Can Hoffman overcome that barrier? If there’s one thing he doesn’t lack, it’s confidence. He noted the retirement of some “no” votes and cited veteran lawmakers’ experience that it generally take five to seven years in Iowa to get a big bill passed.
“We’re right in the sweet spot of that,” he said.
And he’s now added another major supporter to his list: Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, who has agreed to speak in support of the legislation at the Iowa Bicycle Coalition’s inaugural banquet, to be held at the Iowa Events Center Jan. 25, just a few weeks after the launch of the Iowa Legislature’s 2025 session.
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Can Iowa be ‘a world capital’ of bicycle trails’?
Iowa Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Luke Hoffman speaks during an August ceremony to celebrate the long-awaited linkage of the High Trestle and Raccoon River Valley trails in Dallas County
It’s a big goal, but far from the only one Hoffman has for the coalition. In addition to generating fiscal support for the BMX facility, he wants to maintain if not expand the state’s spending on trail construction. And ultimately, he wants to launch a robust organization that will ensure safety is a top priority when it comes to planning, building and maintaining Iowa’s transportation system.
To support all that, the coalition for the first time in 12 years has undertaken a survey to quantify the size and economic impact of Iowa’s cycling community and its contribution to the state’s health and appeal as a place to live. Accompanying case studies will seek to provide examples of its impact.
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“I believe it will show bicycling is big business here, and it’s part of our identity,” Hoffman said. “It will help us say we are a world capital of trails. We can lean into that.”
If Iowa cycling can get others — lawmakers, economic development experts, health care leaders, corporate employers — to recognize its value, he said, it can become a powerful tool for limiting the state’s “brain drain” and turning the economic corner for its small towns on growing trail networks.
It’s an ambitious goal. Too ambitious, perhaps?
Hoffman brushes aside the question, saying he’s only getting started.
“Honestly, I feel like the bar was set pretty low,” he said. “We have the opportunity to set the bar very high, and I’m personally invested in it because of the experience I had on pre-ride, even more than I already was. If I wasn’t before, for sure I am now.”
Bill Steiden is the investigative and business editor for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at [email protected].
Meet Luke Hoffman
AGE: 35
LIVES: Des Moines. Native of Thurman.
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s of public policy, master’s of public administration, University of Nebraska Omaha
CAREER: Executive director, Iowa Bicycle Coalition since October 2023; former director, Iowa Rivers; campaign director for 2020 Polk County Land & Legacy bond issue renewal; prior positions at United Way of the Heartland and Greater Omaha Chamber
FAMILY: Parents, Ross and Valerie Hoffman, sisters Emily Smith and Nathalie Hoffman and brother Ben Hoffman.
About the Des Moines Register’s 15 People to Watch in 2025
It’s a Des Moines Register tradition to close out each year and open the next by introducing readers to 15 People to Watch — individuals expected to make an impact on Iowa in the coming year.
Register journalists and readers make nominations, which editors winnow to 15. They include Iowans making a difference in nonprofit advocacy, the arts, law enforcement, farming and fashion design.
We hope you are as inspired by reading about them as we were in profiling them.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Bicycle coalition chief aims to make Iowa a ‘world capital’ of cycling
