MY TRIP TO THE DC BIKE SUMMIT, MARCH 3-5, 2004

Just under 400 people dedicated to the cause of cycling descended upon Washington DC for the Bike Summit, an annual event that educates Congress as to how cycling can cure a myriad of society's ills.  The five elements of our message-
  • Strengthen and protect Enhancements, CMAQ and other TEA-21 programs.  Don't you just love government-speak?  TEA-21 is the big highway-spending bill that comes up once every six years or so.  Within it is funded just about anything and everything having to do with roads and, thus, cyclists.  "Enhancements" refers to things like recreational trails.  "CMAQ" stands for Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality, and is the rationale for all manner of programs to reduce auto traffic and improve our air.
     
  • Safety Funding for Bicycling and Walking.  Cycling and pedestrian accidents account for 20% of all road fatalities in California, but get less than 5% of the funding set aside for addressing safety issues.  Clearly there is need for more work in this area!  Funds are used to help identify and fix road hazards, including better lighting, traffic medians that can serve as a refuge for pedestrians caught crossing a wide street by a changing light, installation of safer storm drains, etc.
     
  • Safe Routes to Schools.  This one deserves an entire website all to itself!  Back in the day, 60% of the kids walked or rode bikes to school.  The number is now around 10%, with our schools becoming severely-congested transit stations, and our kids losing out on exercise opportunities at a time when we're getting daily news reports about the severity of childhood obesity.  Safe Routes to Schools will provide walkability and bikeability audits, installation of traffic calming (slowing) devices where appropriate, education to teach children how to safely ride or walk to school and encourage them to do so, increased traffic enforcement around schools and cooperation between school officials, law enforcement and transportation planners.
     
  • Bicycle Commute Act.  This allows up to $100/month to employees who commute to work by bicycle, to be used to offset the costs of doing so.  There's a lot more to it than that; I'll provide more info soon.
     
  • Complete Streets.  This is a great program; the idea is to require that all new road projects include bicycle & pedestrian consideration by default (which is not presently the case).  Justification would have to be provided for why there is not bicycle & pedestrian accommodation.  It will also create and enforce a uniform standard for how intersections and roadways are designed, which would preclude another abomination like the 280/Page Mill interchange.  Complete Streets can also save money, since it costs far more to retrofit bikes back into the mix (when a new project leaves bikes out, possibly severing a major bicycle artery, and has to be fixed).

Making life difficult is the massive federal budget deficit; President Bush has threatened to veto any highway appropriations bill that comes in at over $252 billion (although privately he's said he'd allow up to $271 billion), while the version that's passed the House (and incorporates our requests) stands at about $330 billion.  The fear is that, if things are cut back, they might eliminate some programs entirely.  We understand the need to control spending, but ask that any cuts made are proportional.  For example, the Safe Routes to Schools program is funded at $250 million in the House version of Tea-21.  The Senate could either eliminate it entirely, or cut it way back to just $70 million.  Given the obvious benefits of the program (healthier kids, less congestion, safer streets, friendlier communities), we feel we have a great program that deserves substantial funding... and, by and large, people agree.  Nobody is against the concept of Safe Routes to Schools.  It's like Apple Pie; it's un-American to be against it, and polls consistently show extraordinary support.  Plus, pilot programs in Marin have made exceptional progress... Safe Routes to Schools works!

   
Tuesday morning, 8:15am on the way to the airport, but first a stop to vote in the primary election.  It would seem a bit odd for a lobbying trip to DC to pre-empt voting!  Plus, it came in handy later to be able to tell my Representative that I'd voted for him.   Mandatory picture of interesting clouds, seen from the SF-LA portion of the trip.  No interesting clouds of note from LA to DC, but still a nicer flight than expected on Southwest.   Wednesday morning, way too early!  We had to register at 7am DC time, 4am for me (and I'm not a morning person).  Shortly after we have our inspirational speech from Rep Blumenauer of Oregon, truly a champion of cyclists!
   
Most of your California Advocacy team; I believe there were 23 of us total (3 or 4 of us from shops, maybe 6 or 7 from the manufacturing end of the business, and the rest of them people who have built a good part of their lives around making California a better place for cycling.

Please understand, those non-industry advocates are working harder than you can possibly imagine, far surpassing the efforts of the industry itself.
Later that morning begins what seems like an endless series of seminars & presentations, some mind-numbing, some fascinating.  The middle photo is Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá Colombia, who turned his city inside-out by banning cars from much of the city on Sundays, giving the streets back to the people.  The results were astounding in terms of improvements in quality-of-life as people met their neighbors and walked the streets... millions of them.  He had many profound comments, but the one I found most interesting was his assertion that we know more about the ideal environment for a whale than we do for a child (but that it was obvious that a city designed for cars was far from ideal for people).  
   
Thursday morning (gosh, that's today, it seems so long ago as I type this!) we're having our final strategy session at breakfast, after having been given a rousing speech by Congressman Oberstar (middle photo), a top-ranking Representative on the Transportation sub-committee (very important for anything having to do with roads) and a big-time cyclist!  He and Blumenauer are, or should be, your heroes.
An inside joke here; that's Martha Emmons (above left) of Bikeworld in Kentucky, hanging up her coat.  Last year her coat got misplaced among other nearly-identical coats, leading her eventually to "find" one that wasn't hers (which was rudely pointed out by the actual coat owner's husband).  After looking all over the place, I figured out that they'd moved the coat rack and hers might have ended up elsewhere, and I found it behind the rack on the floor.  I figured it would be a good idea to take a photo of her real coat this time, just in case.  

Catching a quick moment with Barbara Boxer, one of California's Senators (the other being Dianne Feinstein).  She wasn't actually part of our meeting; that was left to her transportation staffer, shown in the middle of the wide photo to the right.
 

Above and left are photos from our meeting with Barbara Boxer and her staffer in charge of transportation issues.  Something many don't realize is that, when you go to DC, you rarely meet with your actual congressperson, but rather with a staff member who specializes in a particular field.  That staff member is the expert and has the complete trust of the congressperson, who generally acts on their recommendations.  At first you may think you're getting short changed, but the reality is that there's no way a congressperson can possibly be "up" on all of the various issues in their district.

For me, this trip was wonderfully productive, and everything that my first trip (last year) wasn't.  I had six meetings, at the offices of Anna Eshoo, Tom Lantos, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Lee & Juanita Millender-McDonald.

In particular it was the meeting with Tom Lantos's Legislative Director, Ron Grimes, that made everything worthwhile.  Why?  Because I regarded last year's meeting with the same gentleman as a complete disaster, the sort of performance that actually harms the cause more than helps.  How bad was it?

I'd made an off-hand remark about France (something along the lines of "I feel more out-of-place in DC than I do in France" which was absolutely true, but meant to be funny... unfortunately, Mr. Grimes didn't seem to take it that way as he stood up slowly, looked around, and said "We don't mention France in this office."  This because it was a world in which Lantos had thought France, a supposed ally, had deserted the US regarding Iraq).

Keep in mind that I was alone, one-on-one with Mr. Grimes last year, and feeling incredibly nervous and unprepared.  So from that point on, I felt like I never really got going and, that being my final office visit, left DC on quite a low note.

But sometimes history does rewrite itself.  I had looked at my schedule and noted that, once again, I was meeting with Mr. Grimes, and approached the meeting with much fear & trepidation.  But everything quickly changed for the better.  Way better!

First, I had a partner, somebody far more experienced at lobbying efforts- Bert Hill of the BikeStation coalition.  Great guy.  Second, Ron Grimes immediately recognized me (which wasn't necessarily a good thing...) and told me that it was a direct result of my visit last year that convinced Tom Lantos to become a co-sponsor of the Commuter Bike Bill.  And from there things only got better.  So I not only had a great meeting today, but get to look back at my previous "failure" and turn it upside-down.

Long-term, my goal is to find a way to get local city planners back to the Bike Summit.  The message from other municipalities present is that incorporating cycling into the daily life of a city has made for a better community, with less traffic, healthier lifestyles, friendlier neighborhoods... in general, a more "livable" community.  A place people want to live.

In the end, if there's one thing that really strikes me, it's this.  It's not about what the city or government can do for bicycling.  It's what bicycling can do for them!

--Mike--

 
 
 
 

And yes, this is an exceptionally-rare photo of me on this website, next to Representative Oberstar.  Noteworthy not only because there are few photos of me, but even more so because I'm wearing a dress jacket & tie.  You'll have to trust me that that's something very few have seen.

And from the photo, you can't even tell that I kept the top button of my shirt undone the entire day.  Hey, I may have been talked into looking respectable, but there are limits, and choking myself is one of them.
 
         
Google references on Bogota's car-free Sundays (and eventually car-free city)
Google references on Tea-21 & bicycles
Google referencs on Safe Routes to Schools
California Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP)
California Bicycle Coalition's page on Tea-21 and other bicycle projects
California's 8-page Department of Transportation paper on the many health benefits of Safe Routes to Schools
California's Highway Design Manual (specifically, the section dealing accommodating bicyclists
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