Our 40th year of bicycle advocacy is coming to a close, and the East Bay is a better place to ride than it has ever been. Thanks to your help as a member, we’ve had some great victories over the years. We’ve had our share of setbacks, too. But whether we’re working on a Bay Trail connector or convincing city council to approve a bike lane, we’ve overcome challenges through the steadfast support of our members.
Please stand by EBBC by making a tax-deductible gift today.
Earlier this month, we faced the greatest setback in our 40 year history when Measure B1 fell short of the votes it needed to pass. I’m writing today to tell you how much more difficult bike advocacy will be in the years to come. But more importantly, I’m writing to tell you how we’re going to overcome these difficulties.
The path ahead of us is not going to be easy. Without the funding from Measure B1, bringing bike lanes and boulevards to your neighborhood will be more of an uphill struggle than ever. It will take countless hours of pounding the pavement, bringing state and federal funding for bicycles home to the East Bay. It will take new staff members out in the field, advocating tirelessly to bring bicycle lanes into your community.
We can’t do this without growing our coalition. Please, make a year-end gift today to help us reach our goal of $24,000 and continue our important work.
If I sound confident that EBBC can recover from this setback, it’s because we’ve done it before. In 1998, our grassroots advocacy team worked to raise the bicycle funding in Measure B from nothing to 2.5%. The plan was shot down, and critics blamed the extraordinary 2.5% in bicycle funding for its failure. Other advocacy groups might have given up at this point. We got to work.
We built bridges with city planners and local businesses, spreading the revolutionary idea that bicycling should have a part in the transportation future of the East Bay. We met in libraries and on living room floors, working on a campaign to protect bike funding from the critics. We did more than just protect bicycle funding in the plan – we doubled it to 5%. In the fall of 2000, we brought that plan to the polls and we won by a landslide.
We’re a stronger bicycle advocacy organization than we were twelve years ago. We have a team of four staff members working full-time for better bicycling in the East Bay. When we speak with policymakers, we now represent three times as many members. And our work during this campaign has brought an unprecedented amount of goodwill and political clout to the bike community of the East Bay.
Competing interest groups are already trying to chip away at bike funding, intent on diverting it towards highway expansion and other special projects. But with your support, we will be ready to stop them. We have already set to work, collaborating with policymakers to craft new transportation plans for Alameda and Contra Costa counties – plans that are even better for bicyclists in the East Bay. Our work is just beginning, and we need your support to make it happen.
You’ve helped us accomplish so much already. Members like you helped us win the first bicycle access on BART in 1975, just like you helped us to launch a successful pilot this summer to bring bike access to BART during all hours of the day. Together we’ve worked with planners to bring the first bike lanes to cities across the East Bay, and helped to connect these lanes into growing networks of bikeways. We brought the first Bike to Work Day to the Bay Area in 1996, and we have grown it to an annual tradition where hundreds of thousands discover how great it can be to start their day off in the saddle.
But the best is yet to come.
Please, make a tax-deductible contribution to the East Bay Bicycle Coalition today. Your gift is critical to our success over the next two years, and will allow us to win the difficult victories that will transform the East Bay. Thank you so much for your support. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Sincerely,
Renee Rivera
Please, transform the East Bay by making a year-end gift:
