Volunteer training makes bicycle advocacy easy

Bicycle Coalition members brainstorm bikeway designs at last February's meet-up at the Telegraph Oakland beer garden. Bicycle Coalition members brainstorm bikeway designs at last February's meet-up at the Telegraph Oakland beer garden. Photo: Dave Campbell Photo: Dave Campbell Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Volunteer training makes bicycle advocacy easy 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Whether you bike every day for your commute, get out on weekend road rides or ride for neighborhood errands, the experience is made better or worse depending on the streets you are riding on. Maybe you live in Pleasant Hill or Walnut Creek and ride to BART on the Iron Horse Trail. Or perhaps your commute from Oakland to UC Berkeley takes you through the traffic-calmed Webster/Shafter corridor. If you have a low-stress commute on established paths, bike lanes or bike boulevards, those improvements make your ride feel much safer and more pleasant.

How do these bike lanes, bike boulevards and other facilities - Oakland alone has more than 140 miles of bicycle facilities on its streets - come to be on our streets? The impetus for these changes comes from people who live there but take the extra step of asking their city to make an improvement for walking and bicycling.

Throughout the Bay Area, nonprofit organizations like the East Bay and San Francisco bicycle coalitions organize for better biking and have paid staff to lead campaigns for specific projects and streets. However, with limited staff and resources, none of these organizations could accomplish even a fraction of their projects without volunteer power. Empowered neighbors and commuters make these organizations successful. For instance:

-- On a narrow path along Alameda's bay shoreline, pedestrians and bicyclists have been narrowly missing each other. So Bike Walk Alameda, a group of local advocates, asked to have the path widened with a two-way cycle track to separate pedestrians from bicyclists. The city agreed, and construction on the first two-way cycle track in the East Bay starts this spring.

-- In Berkeley, an old, abandoned neighborhood railroad was home to garbage, drugs and prostitution. Volunteers with Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition worked with neighbors and asked for a path and park improvements, enjoyed today by hundreds of people daily.

-- With similar hopes, volunteers in Lafayette and Fremont are getting organized through the East Bay Bicycle Coalition to make bike-friendly improvements in their cities.

Whether your city enjoys a long-standing, energetic group of local advocates or is now ready to begin pressuring decision makers, the East Bay Bicycle Coalition is ready to help you ramp up your volunteer energy for 2014.

The East Bay Bicycle Coalition and Walk Oakland Bike Oakland are hosting a three-day workshop March 21-23 at the Waterfront Hotel in Jack London Square, brought to you by the Alliance for Biking & Walking, a nationwide coalition of more than 200 state and local bicycle and pedestrian organizations working together to promote bicycling and walking. This workshop is designed to show you how to "ask for change" and turn an issue into an achievable goal. The process leads participants through steps to build a solid campaign and create a winning strategy for your new bike and pedestrian project.

Teams of local volunteers and leaders will be joined by advocates from around California and national bike and pedestrian advocacy experts from the alliance. In three days, you will learn key organizing tactics to prioritize, organize and conduct campaigns that transform the transportation landscape in your city.

The cost for this three-day training is $125 per person; you can get a $50 discount by using promo code "GETWINS" when you register at http://bit.ly/MJLURh by Feb. 14. Scholarships are available; contact dave@ebbc.org for more information and how to apply.

Bike About Town is presented by the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, a 4,000-member nonprofit working for safe, convenient and enjoyable bicycling for all people in the East Bay. For more biking resources, go to www.ebbc.org.