This is a guest post from reader Sonya Hendren. Sonya is a bike advocate and educator in the Sacramento region.

In looking back at this year’s May is Bike Month, two comments during meetings have left an impression, informing my current opinions on the efficacy of our bike advocacy.

During a neighborhood association meeting about walking/biking safety, a panelist emphasized that transportation projects are funded by competitive grants. It’s a fixed-sum game: if Sacramento gets a grant, all the losing cities’ projects are left unfunded. If another city’s project wins, Sacramento’s project doesn’t happen, at least not in this funding cycle, from this source. Of course our first instinct, mine included, is to cheer for Sacramento; we get funding, we do projects.

My revelation is that I don’t want Sacramento to win competitive grants. In the Freeport Blvd Transportation plan, the city never considered a road diet (reduction in lanes), despite it being a prominent request during the community input phase, because their goal is to maintain previous ADT (average daily traffic count.)¹ The city works to maintain current levels of private-car use. The city’s Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, companion document to the General Plan, reduces the MCCC (Mayors’ Commission on Climate Change) goal of 30% Active Transportation, down to 6%. Under these practices and policies, Sacramento would use transportation funding to further cement car-dependency. Grant funding would be better spent in another city that is actually trying to shift transportation mode share away from private-cars, trying to reduce VMT (vehicle miles traveled). The project in another city would do more good to Sacramento by serving as a positive example, than spending the money in Sacramento under Sacramento’s current practices and policies.

Second, during a debrief-and-next-steps meeting on school “bike buses,” I learned that after Safe Routes to Schools programs end, feedback of continued walking/biking is the rare exception, not the norm. The norm is that Safe Routes to Schools programs are funded for one to three years, they get a group of kids walking or biking during those years, and when the funding ends, all the families go back to driving. Current infrastructure and incentives are such that without a paid person there helping, even students/families who have been taught how to walk/bike to school and practiced it for years, do not. That’s so discouraging: if “holding people’s hands,” not just teaching them the routes, but traveling those routes with them regularly, sometimes for years, doesn’t convert people to using the routes, how can any of our encouragement projects have any affect??

Because cyclists are so small [compared to cars] they take-up small space in the visual perception of drivers and therefore also their memories. The ratio of cyclists to cars out and about will always seem far smaller than it is, due to the sheer space cars take-up. Add inattention blindness (our brains fill-in from assumptions, rather than processing every bit of visual data) to that, and it’s clear that drivers far under-perceive bikes. We aren’t going to peer-pressure people into biking just by commuting about.

If just getting grants isn’t enough, encouragement up to hand-holding doesn’t cut it, and our good examples are under-perceived, what is needed? My current take.

A significant portion of the population won’t cycle for transportation unless their perceptions of safety change. These people will bike on a path through a park, recreationally, but they won’t ride in a bike lane on a street with cars. We need separated bike trails or multi-use paths for these people. It’s not about changing their minds, because they aren’t wrong: cars weigh 20 times what a human does, and rates of severe injury and death increase exponentially with collision speed.

A larger percentage of the population will change their transportation methods when the incentives change sufficiently. Separated bike trails and paths that go to their destination could be their incentive, like the previous group, but a whole range of other incentives could work as well.

The recent popularity of e-bikes provides an example. Studies show that people who buy a new e-bike ride it more than people who buy a new traditional bike, and they use their e-bike to replace some of their car trips. E-bikes don’t need to be as fast as cars, they don’t need to have the range of cars, and they don’t need to be as physically easy for a newbie to take-up as cars, to partially replace cars. They just need to be a bit faster than a traditional bike (narrowing the speed gap), a bit further range, (narrowing the range gap) and a bit physically easier than traditional bikes, for people to convert some of their car trips to bike trips.

Other changes that narrow the incentive gap between cars and bikes, should have similar results. There are many possibilities:

• Lowering speed limits city-wide would narrow the speed gap between cars and bikes (and be great for safety! But would require some sort of automatic enforcement)
• Incentives could be cost-based, like a weight-based vehicle registration fee sufficient to cover the cost of road maintenance, or rebates for buying an e-bike.
  Reduction of on-street car parking, or increased cost of car parking (public spaces have higher use than free storage of personal property) would reduce incentives for car use.
• Lower-stress bike access to more destinations would reduce a huge access gap between cars and bikes – such as re-designating second car lanes or parallel roads as bike lanes or bike-only roads.
  Adding secure bike parking (ie bike lockers), especially in high-theft areas, like colleges, would reduce the theft-rate gap between bikes and cars.

May is Bike Month

Where are we at with May is Bike Month? Before I come across as an “armchair warrior,” let me clarify that I do my part for May is Bike Month: I create schools events, I hand-out swag, I ask people to register, I’ve even led pre-rides to events. I work hard for May is Bike Month, because it’s what we have for activism here in Sacramento, but that doesn’t mean I understand it.

If you had funding to get people on bikes, how would you spend it? Build infrastructure (like bike paths) or lobby for policy changes, right? The MiBM technique of handing out swag, and asking people to sign-up for another website/app and do the tedious work of logging their trips, seems designed to be ineffectual. It’s like if someone sat in a room and said “hmmm, how can we spend this money that’s meant for alternative transportation, in a way that has the least chance of threatening car-use?” Yes, I know it’s the “encouragement” portion of a 5E’s approach (Engineering, Education, Encouragement, Evaluation, and Equity), but Safe Routes to Schools seems to have disproved that category working in isolation.

Assuming the money can’t be redirected, I am still a fan of MiBM, for the bike-positive messaging and celebration. Any bike campaign is a good bike campaign. I am worried about the diminishing visibility. MiBM no longer has the funding for t-shirts; I need to keep trying to accept that. But those t-shirts are worn everywhere year-round, more places than bikes are seen – like the indoors. I see them while shopping, running errands, at events and activities. For me as a cyclist, the shirts make me feel safer: here’s another person who is unlikely to kill me. More importantly, for the general public, who see the t-shirts, but don’t think about them, the shirts provide subliminal messaging that Sacramentans are in favor of bikes. You only have to look online for examples of places where bike-use is so detested that threatening violence against cyclists is socially accepted. I worry what will happen to Sacramento’s bike-positive atmosphere as those t-shirts fall out of circulation.

Similarly, I used to see huge MiBM banners on the outside of office buildings when I was out walking around; not anymore. There used to be posters with a huge, visible-from-a-distance logo for participants to print-out. Current poster templates are busy, with photos of people around the edges, so small that you need to be up close to see. In fact, the most prominent thing in the current MiBM branding is the tri-colored Wesley-Crusher-stripes, and that’s subliminally promoting Star Trek more than biking!

Where would I like to see May is Bike Month go from here?

• Definitely a renewed focus on visibility. Banners, posters, yard signs, etc.
• I would like to see far more organizations, businesses, and individuals holding events, or even just promoting. Lately, it can feel like a promotion coming from one organization, when it should be a community celebration belonging to everyone, owned by no organization, much more like Pride the following month. In pursuit of that, I think we should “hand-hold” as many organizations as possible, teaching them how to put-on events, so they’ll hopefully do so on their own the next year, while we hand-hold a new batch. Pedalpalooza in Portland provides an example of a full ride calendar, a level for us to move toward with our rides and events.²
• SABA’s use of “pre-rides” to events converts the ever-popular group rides into rides for transportation. I would like to see this continued and expanded.
• We need to ditch logging rides as a funding source. Would-be participants can see that this is busy-work, and it’s a huge turn-off, deterring them from getting involved. (Remember, cyclists are rebels, they are already consciously going against the status-quo of car-culture; they aren’t the type to just accept that logging miles is a benefit because we say so.) I would like to see it replaced by a large fundraising event, such as a benefit concert, a ball, a gala (think Met Gala), or a fundraising dinner (start where we are, but aim to work-up to the prestige of Farm to Fork.) My particular slice of the bike community may heavily favor free entertainment, but you only have to look around to see the huge popularity of paid-events. Think of food-truck events, where thousands pay an admission fee, just for the opportunity to spend more money.
• Lastly, I would like to see productive participation opportunities offered. Collecting signatures for a ballot measure at MiBM events. A group ride to a school board meeting to ask for a Safe Routes to Schools program. “Guerrilla infrastructure” projects offering opportunities to help build and place quick-build bike lanes, road blocks etc, and jobs to check-on and maintain the projects, or even just report problems. Giving people something productive and clearly beneficial to do, gives them a reason to participate.

¹https://gettingaroundsac.blog/2023/01/22/city-of-sac-blind-adherence-to-adt/

² Unbeknownst to me, while I was writing this, the team added a year-round rides+events calendar to the website, with a “submit a ride” button, so they are working on growing the calendar