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??
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Getting Around Sacramento 