The second Minnesota Bike Summit has been scheduled for Monday, March 5, in Saint Paul. This event, hosted by BikeMN, brings together people from across the state to talk bicycling amongst themselves, then with state officials and elected representatives.
New this year will be scheduled meetings with representatives, with scheduling facilitated by BikeMN — probably in response to many attendees’ bafflement with the process. (I’m hoping for encouragement for slightly more upscale attire from BikeMN for these meetings as well, but we’ll see. Last year’s crew was occasionally pretty motley, and played right into perceptions of cyclists as a fringe group.)
The 2012 legislative agenda will no doubt be a big part of this event. It’s pretty similar to 2011s, since so little got done last year (in most areas of government, not just bikes!).
I attended last year and provided a lot of coverage of the event. The event is likely to be larger this year, which may serve as a warning to those with claustrophobia — the event site is nice enough, and convenient to the Capitol, but a tight squeeze nonetheless. We had 175 attendees last year. I suspect 200 may require us all to be extra-friendly to one another.
Yesterday was the great debate and committee markup session for the House Transportation Bill. As expected, it was all about the posturing about priorities.
Those priorities, per the chief supporters, were highways. A provision revealed in markup yesterday showed that dedicated funding for transit would also disappear.
An amendment to restore enhancements and Safe Routes to Schools failed 27-29. Three Republicans voted for the amendment. More than 80 other amendments were discussed. The bill itself eventually cleared the Committee on a vote of 29-24.
Meanwhile, the House Ways & Means Committee, who can be summed up as “People who control a lot of how money is used,” announced their plan to forbid gas tax revenue from funding transit. Yes, indeed! Gas taxes are for cars and highways, silly humans! Gas taxes should be used to cater to the likes of this gentleman, who raves on about subsidy given to transit, without looking at the inherent subsidies given to single-user cars via highway funds and artificially low gas prices.
Here’s the thing, though. The House does not act alone. Bills require Senate approval. And that just will not happen. This is a bunch of political posturing. Panic may be an overwrought response by advocates, because the Senate drew a line in the sand yesterday as well. The Senate Banking Committee has passed a two year transit bill from committee with unanimous bipartisan support. Yes, unanimous. Yes, Republican and Democratic votes. Among other tidbits, the bill would allow federal funds to be used on transit operations — not just build-out or capital improvement.
The House Transportation bill will never clear the full Senate, which is still Democratic. It has not been written in good faith to pass both houses. It was written to serve as campaign fodder, particularly in rural districts with a lot of roads. That’s it.
Do we still need to widen the circle? Of course we do. But maybe we can all let our blood pressure go down a bit and look at productive ways to get advocacy out of panic mode and back into building a broad movement.
January 31, 2012
by julie Comments Off on Tuesday Transpo Bill Update!
So, yeah. As usual, the expected action from people who like walking and biking and sharing roads and all of that is to contact your Congressperson, particularly those on the House Transportation Committee. In Minnesota, that’s Tim Walz of the DFL, and Chip Cravaack on the Republican majority.
I’ve been on a wee bit of a spree lately about the continual state of Defcon 11 every time there is federal hiccuping about restricting funds for Transportation Enhancements, or cutting Safe Routes to Schools, or classifying bicycles as vegetables instead of vehicles.
Here’s the thing: These are serious issues. We should be concerned about them. But freaking out every time it happens and having all the bicycle advocates write and call their congresscritters is a cute little bandage on a much larger problem — one that I don’t know that the active transport community is really prepared to deal with as yet.
To wit: The problem isn’t that these programs are under attack. The problem is that they are considered low-hanging fruit because the active transport lobby is considered a fringe segment, a small special interest group who wears funny spandex and don’t shower enough. The problem is that “cutting spending” is a big issue for a lot of people, but “safer biking and walking” is not.
Part of this is just the limitation of advocacy. Part of it is a failure to reach out from the circle of the converted and widen the scope of support. Part of it is that some of the advocates are unwilling to put the issues in a framework that a lot of people can support.
In general, biking and walking are not considered by a lot of people to be valid modes of daily transport. And that’s the problem. And to those people, when the advocacy community is represented by the militant car-free, or people who don’t have to buy diapers by the case, or people who can’t tie a tie and heavens knows don’t have to wear one to work… they get written off by the people who do have all of those issues.
The People For Bikes campaign from Bikes Belong has its heart in the right place — anyone who has ridden a bike should care. But even for P4B, a lot of the outreach has come at big bike races or other specialty events where the attendees are predisposed or already part of the community. Preaching to the converted is easy. This may be why, after launching the site in 2010 to try to get a million people to sign their pledge, they still haven’t hit half the goal.
Becoming sympathetic to people who perceive biking as “nice, but not for me because of time/family/commitment,” and showing them how offering added options helps them in their daily life even if they do not themselves embed their buttocks on banana seats is a lot harder. And it’s not necessarily happening enough.
As a result, TE is going to be on the block every 3-6 months for a long time. Until bicyclists convince Main Street America that bikes and pedestrians matter, that they are not merely a fringe contingent, those programs are easy targets to attack.
So ask yourself, if you support bicycling and walking, how you can help make it sympathetic to the woman working full-time with 2 kids in diapers. How street calming makes sense for an immigrant family who perceive bicycles as something children and poor people ride, and who aspire to join the car culture. How providing options that can increase community cohesion is not about special interests, but about providing freedom of choice as current options force a single modal selection. Can you back off of “bicycles as transportation!!” and expand the circle to emphasize the bicycle as a leisure activity that can and should be accommodated, and that it’s okay to maybe drive to the store for 4 gallons of milk, but bike out for some ice cream with the family — an activity that requires safe routes and traffic calming? And then get out there and try to do it.
It’s not that the lifestyle cyclists are wrong. But if the movement cannot expand and accept a broader base of people who benefit from transportation options and traffic calming, we will never get beyond a state of Save Cycling! Panic! Write your Congressperson Now! If we’re going to be expending all this energy, maybe we should do it fixing the disease, instead of slapping band-aids on gaping head wounds. And at the end of the day, the problem is that the circle isn’t yet big enough.
So go forth, and be friendly. Accept that multiple transport modes work for different situations in different families. Sympathize. And try to bring them into the movement.
January 27, 2012
by julie Comments Off on Summation of Proposed Transport Bill Sort of Available
One key thing in their summary to consider is that the bill refers to projects like the  Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program as “not in the federal interest.” I’ve stated before that I believe that even reauthorized, it would be hard to imagine Minneapolis getting another core grant, versus giving that kind of money ($25 million) to another metro area to do fundamental start-up enhancements. Under the bill as we are currently aware of it, no city would be getting bupkus in that regard. (Per Streetsblog, cities get the short end of anything included in the bill, in general.)
The full bill is expected to hit the public on Tuesday, January 31. It’s pretty much a sure thing that even committee staffers won’t get a chance to really read the whole thing before the committee starts voting on it. Says something wonderful right there about the legislative process, doesn’t it?
The second Minnesota Bike Summit has been scheduled for Monday, March 5, in Saint Paul. This event, hosted by BikeMN, brings together people from across the state to talk bicycling amongst themselves, then with state officials and elected representatives.