 Thank you so much for joining us today for this session on People Power in Bike Advocacy. My name is Sandhya Laddha and I am the Policy Advocacy Director at Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition and I have some amazing panelists with me here today but I'll come to them in a few minutes. So before I jump into the session, I'd like to tell you a little bit about Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. SVBC is a non-profit, it's a member-based organization and our mission is to create a healthy community, economy and environment through bicycling in both San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. Our goal is to get 10% of trips by bike by 2025. We have two main branches of work. One is changing the built environment, that is what our advocacy team does. We work with decision makers, we work with community members to bring about safe bicycle infrastructure and policies so people feel safe and comfortable riding their bikes on the streets. On the other side, we work on changing behavior, that is where our programs team works with the people, they organize a bunch of social rides, they organize safe routes to school programs, commute workshops and so on, so people feel comfortable riding their bikes on the street. Diving a little deeper into advocacy, we have three main branches or three streams of our advocacy work. First and foremost, it's the staff. The staff is responsible for the day-to-day advocacy work, relationship building with the decision makers and working with the community. Then we have our local teams, we are going to talk about this in detail in today's session. Our local teams are our grassroots base of support. And finally, we have a policy advisory committee. So whenever we seek advice on regional issues or we want to take a position, we reach out to the policy advisory committee. They are an advisory body, as the name suggests. So what are we going to talk about today? Let me begin with introducing everyone here. My name is Sandhya. Hi everyone again. I'm the policy advocacy director at SVBC. I've been here for about three plus years now. I was born and brought up in India and I moved to the United States four years ago and have been working in transportation and making streets safer since then. I'm passing the mic on to Ari. Hi, I'm Ari. I'm the team lead for the Sunnyvale team. I'm also a college student. I'm at Mission College right now in Santa Clara and I'll be transferring to UC Davis in the fall. Woo! Yeah, so I'm very excited about that. I've been biking all my life and I started getting to bicycle advocacy work when I first started biking to school for the first time and I was like, hey, that fothole could be fixed and there's a bike lane and then there's not a bike lane and that needs to be fixed. And so I got involved with the bike coalition and eventually became a team leader of Sunnyvale. Thank you, Ari. And also congrats on getting into Davis. I did not know this until now. Yeah, let's give it up for him. It always blows my mind just how young Ari is because he is so active in lobbying us. So my name is Omar. I'm on the city council for the city of Sunnyvale. That is the appropriate amount of applause for Sunnyvale, I guess. I feel really lucky because I got in at exactly 8.59 today. There was an accident on the 8.80, so this might be a surprise. This might be a surprise to everyone in the room, but there are downsides to taking cars. Who would have thought? But I was elected two years ago now in 2020, studied policy analysis and management at Cornell, graduated class of 2019 and I've just been so excited to get to work with Ari and people like y'all on improving our bike infrastructure and, you know, moat ship within the city of Sunnyvale. Thank you, Council Member Dean Omar. My name is Rayan Modeshemi. I am a co-lead for the San Mateo local team, which covers mostly San Mateo but does some advocacy and are joining cities like Hillsboro and Berlin Game and Foster City. I am a recent college graduate. I graduated from Columbia University and I studied operations research because I thought that all the problems in transportation were solely technical and that there were no political issues with transforming political change. Needless to say, I stand incorrect and have tried to work for the past year or two to understand how we can make political change and especially in suburban places that are further behind the curve in terms of implementing bicycle and pedestrian projects. Thank you. Thanks Ari, Omar and Rayan for being with me here today and let's get into talking about this local team model. So jumping right into the very first presentation, today's structure will be I will give a brief about what the local team model is for SVBC and then we'll dive deep into two of our amazing local teams, that's Sunnyvale and Santa Clara. So jumping right into the, to what exactly is this local team model? So as I mentioned before, SVBC covers two counties, San Mateo and Santa Clara and together we have 35 towns and cities to cover. That is a lot of jurisdictions and we want to be involved in every bike project in every city. We want to be involved in every bike plan, provide feedback, input, make sure all the right bike projects are in there. We want to let cities know that you have dedicated bike-prepared funding for in their city budget process. We want to be involved in policies, attend B-PAC meetings, council meetings, suggest bike-share, build relationships with city staff and council. How are we supposed to do that with just a small team of four? I can see so many bike coalition reps here, there's Muddin, there's Bikes Bay, there's Sonoma. All of you know it is a struggle to be present every single place. So and like what are the problems that we had, we could, we had to pick and choose between projects. We barely had about four to five major campaigns every year. We had to prioritize between cities. We had to pick one or another. We had limited participation in B-PAC meetings and council meetings. And all of this led to limited engagement on the ground issues. So that led us to shifting our goal or our focus to this local team model. I've said local team a lot. Let's now dive into what exactly it is. So these are city-based teams. They include people who live, work, or play in a particular city, who know their city better than a person who rides or drives on these streets every single day. It includes parents who want safe routes for their kids. It includes seniors who just know the history of their city in and out. Or it could include passionate advocates who have such deep connections with their city staff or decision makers. Or it could be just a bunch of concerned citizens who just want to make their streets safer. And all of these people come together to advocate for making their streets safer for people walking and biking. What exactly do these teams do? They have regular meetings, they set up their goals, and they have a work plan. They have campaigns, and they put in strategies and tactics together to make sure they achieve their goals. They organize a bunch of bike rides and other events to recruit more people and just to build credibility for their team, just to show their name out there. And they work with city staff and decision makers very closely. In short, they come together, they organize and advocate. What is SVBC's role behind all this? We provide them technical expertise, we provide them educational forums, connect them with decision makers. We are like the bridge between community members and the decision makers. We provide advocacy and leadership training, provide IT resources, access to tools, help with organizing and admin, provide funds whenever possible. So that is SVBC's guidance or supporting role. We have nine local teams. I know I said 35 cities, but we just have nine local teams so far. And those include San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, not San Mateo County, San Mateo, Redwood City and San Carlos. What has the impact been so far? I said we were able to do only four to five campaigns per year. Now across all the nine local teams, we have 30 plus campaigns. We're able to stay involved in every bike project, at least for the cities in which we have local teams. We have stronger relationships with decision makers. We have high participation in all BPAC and relevant council meetings. And we're able to have a larger impact with respect to making streets safer for those walking and biking. Now, I give you a glimpse of what local teams do and that they've been doing amazing work, but that does not mean that the staff work is over, or we can just have one person managing it all. There is a lot of behind the scenes work. We've put together recommendations. We've put together structure, protocol and processes for working of these teams. And I'm going to give you a glimpse of what that includes. First and foremost, we have recommended leadership roles so that team members are accountable to the work that they're doing and are also consistent throughout. First and foremost, we suggest everyone, every team to have a local team leader. This person is in charge of facilitating meetings, putting together an agenda, also leading campaigns. Then we have a greeter. We have people join local teams at different points of time. So the greeter brings them up to speed on what the team is working on. They also try to gauge their interest, and then they loop them into specific campaigns the team is working on. We have a note taker to take notes and send it out to the Google group. And then we have an outreach head who puts all the team work out on social media, so everyone else knows the amazing work the teams are doing. SVBC hosts a monthly bike-tivist forum series. Now what's the term bike-tivist? So all these local team members who are our bike advocates, we call them bike-tivists. And we hold a monthly bike-tivist forum series, which is on the third Wednesday of every month. It is broken into two pieces. The first half or the first hour is an educational forum, and it's on various topics. And these topics are related to the various goals that the teams have. For example, a team might be interested in vision zero, while some other team might be interested in safe routes to school. So we just get together, discuss with teams on what are the different topics they're interested in, and host our educational forums accordingly. The topics we've covered so far include vision zero, the problem of parking, national transit justice, micromobility, enforcement, and a lot of similar ones. And the second hour is dedicated to local team meetings. So since we're all meeting on Zoom currently, we have breakout sessions, so then we have nine breakouts, and each team has their individual meeting in a particular breakout. Free COVID, we used to meet in person, in some cafe, and get together, know each other. But we're doing all of that over Zoom right now. We're hoping to be able to come back at least to a hybrid model, where at least once in a couple of months, we can all get to see each other in person. And then remaining time, we continue meeting on Zoom. Hopefully, we get there sometime. We also recommend lots of fun and involved activities to build a stronger bond between all these local team members. So one of the activities we did was brainstorming. So this was done at a very first kickoff meeting for one of the teams. Since all the local team members are volunteers, they come up with their own motivation and interest when they join a particular team. So this brainstorming idea, or this brainstorming session, was to bring together, bring on the table, everyone's interest. So somebody was interested in maybe a bike project, which is right outside their house. Maybe somebody was interested in getting a bike superhighway. Maybe somebody was interested in slowing speeds in their city. So everyone brought their interests to the table, and then the group had a discussion. And together, they pick and chose top five goals for the year. So this was that fun activity. And fast forward to one year later, the team did an analysis, a SWOT analysis, to understand where they are at, what went well, what didn't go well, and how could they improve. And based on that, they came up with a work plan for the next year. SVBC also has a local team toolkit, which includes basics of setting up and maintaining every team. It has recruitment methods, it has some different tactics on how to grow and engage your team, how to keep people motivated. It has a local team charter, which talks about do's and don'ts. It has sample letters to council, sample script for talking with council members, and so on. So this is like a guide or a handbook for all local team leaders and members when they are running their own teams. So this was a brief or a glimpse of our local teams, and they have been doing such amazing work. This is not an exhaustive list of the wins that our teams have had in the past year. They've been meeting with city staff, they've built great relationships with council members, and they have been able to push the cities really hard to let the cities know that we really, really care for getting in better bike infrastructure and policies in our cities, and we want to make those improvements, and we want to make those improvements now. With that, I'm gonna stop here, and we can take maybe a couple questions if there are any pressing ones, and next we are gonna segue into talking about how the local team leaders have been running their teams. So yeah. Hi, thanks. I have been so inspired by the work that Silicon Valley is doing, and I've sat in on some of the activist forums, and I'm working on getting a similar model going in my own county. So what I'm curious about is the timeline that it took you to get this rolled out to the sort of more robust program that it is from, you know, okay, we have this idea that we're gonna do this, because obviously I'm building on some of what you've already done, and it would take me a lot longer if I didn't have that, but just sort of, yeah, a little bit more about your timeline. So we had local teams existing for quite some time. In fact, one of our local teams existed before SVBC did, but the teams were mainly just to get together, update each other on what's going on, and maybe like write to cancel if and when needed, but they never really had their campaigns. So we shifted to having the teams run their own campaigns two years ago, back in 2019. If I talk about kicking off one particular team, for example, we recently started a North San Mateo county team, it took about six months to do some background and prep, to like first get hold of some passionate advocates who would be able to lead this team, then also like meeting with city staff and council members to set the stage, and then set up a Google group so that we can, like as in when we talk to interested people, we can pull them on the same platform, then we did a survey to understand what are interests of people and how much time can they spend on engaging for this team. And yeah, it took about six to seven months before we could have our first kickoff meeting. And then once we had a kickoff meeting, we identified a team leader and then went on from there. But yeah, it could like, some cities took about six months, some cities took about a year. So it is a long process, lots of background work before we actually set into these meetings. Sure. Hello, I'm curious about the genesis of the Silicon Valley organization and the one that you work for. Who funds it and who do you answer to? So we're a nonprofit organization and we have three branches of getting funding. We are a member-based organization, so one third of our funding comes from members, one third funding comes from sponsors and grants, and one third comes from major donors and corporates. So we're not directly answerable to anyone, but we work with city staff and decision makers to push them to bring about that change. I hope that answers your question. How have you been in existence? SVPC has been in existence for at least more than a decade. There was a lot of transition. We started with only Santa Clara County and then we evolved further. We had just one part time staff where we did a couple contracts around bike to work there and then we shifted into including San Mateo County and together, I think that was about 10 to 15 years ago and that is where we are at now. I'm gonna lead on to the other presentations at this point and then we'll come back to Q&A later. Thank you. Ari, would you like to go first or should we? I'll take my side first. Okay. What? Go to the next slide. So here's a picture of me on a ride. You go to the next slide, actually. So my involvement with Bicycle Advocacy kind of accumulated over time. I started with just helping out a campaign to get improvements to the Sunnyvale Bicycle Plan in 2020 and then I started a campaign to get a lane close on my street. This was all before I became the team leader of Sunnyvale. I actually never intended to become a team leader but I was at the Zoom meeting to decide who would be the next team leader of Sunnyvale and there was only me and one other person in the meeting so it actually worked out perfect I think. I had since I had the experience with leading a campaign and I had the interest and the time but I think a lot of other team leaders including myself we walked into this excited but also a little nervous because we weren't entirely like sure what we were doing in the sense like we didn't know what we didn't know. So we're grateful to have the support of the bike coalition education and then also just learning from council members and learning from city processes. Next slide. So some of the benefits that I found with the local teams model is definitely the fact that we can really use the local residents energy. People might not be interested in advocating for something like on the other side of town or in the next town over but if there's a project on the street and they like to bike then they'll be able to find a very passionate lead advocate for them. So oftentimes for a campaign that's on a particular street all there are people in my Google group who will step up and I'll have them present to council members, help make the presentations, help create bullet points and other things on the campaign and that really works well to have that local knowledge. Each team has also kind of developed a unique style I have in bike Sunnyvale some different informal roles for different people. I think it's a bit different than the San Mateo team and all teams are different sizes and so that's also and have different levels of activity going on. So that's also a unique factor. One of the interesting things about bike Sunnyvale is that we actually rebranded from the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition Sunnyvale team to just bike Sunnyvale because I thought it would be much more clear what we're doing because not everyone knows, unfortunately not everyone knows what SVPC stands for but we also create a website. Some, I think some of the larger teams have created a website right Ryan and as teams continue to grow I imagine more teams will create their own websites as well and we also collaborate and learn from each other. We have local team meetings monthly where all the team leaders will just talk about upcoming things, give feedback to each other and talk about the next bike to this forum. It's a good place to collaborate and give each other tips and then finally we're able to collaborate across city lines. So for example, for a project in Sunnyvale an advocacy campaign that we were doing I also reached out to the neighboring cities of Santa Clara and Mountain View and Cupertino and got some advocates from there too to also send letters and talk to council members. And that was really helpful. We also can rally together for cities that don't have local teams. For example, Los Altos doesn't currently have a local team. So we, so the surrounding cities, local teams all got together and we reached out to our advocates. That's unfortunate timing. And we got like 20 people to speak at a meeting at Los Altos to get bike lanes on El Camino Real which passed. So that was very exciting. Thank you. Thank you. So over the last year and a half or so we've had 11 campaigns to get more bike lanes and get bicycle friendly policies changes. Most of these have been successful. We're very happy about. We've made active transportation a city priority. We've had successes for three or four projects to get more bike lanes on certain streets. One of which is Sunnyville Avenue which Omar can tell us more about in a few minutes. And this was a particularly important campaign because it was the most important North South corridor in the city and it also involved removing street parking. So the way we generally go about these campaigns is we'll create a slideshow presentation and meet with council members. We will create a kind of mass email system or campaign. So me and maybe some other volunteers will write up some bullet points on why the city council should do X for these reasons and couple bullet points. And we really encourage people in their emails to customize it and make it personalized on why this bike lane will benefit me. It'll make it safer for my kids to get to school. Something like that. Making it personalized rather than just repeating the bullet points, it really has a much stronger impact. We also are able to use the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition Event Brights, sorry, E-Bulletin which is like the mailing list and there's like something like 10,000 people on it and has a 20% open rate. So for example, Sunnyville Avenue project to get people to speak at the council meeting and other public meetings and to write emails. We just sent an email to everyone on the E-Bulletin who lives in Sunnyville and the surrounding cities to come speak and write letters and we got a lot of letters written and then I also got people to come to the two public meetings on this and we got like, I think the ratio of people to speak in favor was free to one of the projects that I was very excited. You wanna talk about the, you know. Okay, oh wait, so I'll talk about something about Avenue and you'll take it back. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. So I'll quickly touch on it. It's interesting because I'm on the other side, right, so I'm on the council in Sunnyville. You know, I feel like Ari is being humble because literally every time there's a single, not even just bike lanes that are up for a vote but anything transportation related, we can always count on, you know, bikes Sunnyville actually showing up and showing out. And so when we did Sunnyville as, you know, as Ari mentioned, they put together a whole campaign around it and as many of you have probably experienced when you're working with councils, if you're removing parking spaces, it gets controversial really fast. I know, it's a shocker, who would have thought? Ryan did it when he started but, you know, one thing that I think is so important about the advocacy model that bike Sunnyville uses is you have to be at that granular of a local level for these changes to happen because, you know, like Sandia was referring to, when you're at the leadership level, you can't be everywhere, you can't be at each of these cities. So getting the local model is so central to it because, and this is a sad reality, is politicians operate in their own ecosystem. You know, they, and like I said, it's sad to say but we, you know, follow our own incentive structure and a lot of times it's not just what's the best decision here to make based off of the merits of the facts but each politician has their own career trajectory they're trying to follow, their own interests at heart and a lot of the time what ends up happening is well what's the incentive structure here? You know, if there's only one group of people that are showing up and saying, hey, if you take away our parking spots, we are gonna make sure you don't get elected again. There are a lot of, I'm not one of those, but there are a lot of members of council who that has an impact on and so having people on the other side saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, this equation has another side to it and we're there as well and we're showing up, that has such an important, important role to play and I think that that actually was the reason we were able to overcome the weight of those residents who, you know, there are about 60 or so houses I believe who we are losing about, you know, 40, I wanna say, parking spaces. There were 100 or so parking spaces on nearby streets that were open and available but obviously the residents are gonna say that but Bikes Sunnyvale showed up and made that apparent to every single council member and showed those facts and told that narrative and I think it was, if that hadn't happened, I don't think the policy would have passed. Yeah, I think so, Mar. Like we go to the next slide. So part of, the other part of the local teams that we like to do is doing events. In conjunction with, you know, SRDC often has their own events that are, but we like to do ours as well and these are really great opportunities to get more members of Silicon Valley. The Bikes School Coalition, it helps us get more members for Bikes Sunnyvale specifically because every time someone signs up for an event, they get added to the SBBC Eventbrite system and their Salesforce system and so we can send emails to them later. We've done eight local rides and there are lots of fun and we draw attention to, you know, infrastructure that needs to be improved and sometimes we get articles written about them as well. Oh, sorry, bike to work day, that's our bike to wherever day in the pandemic times. Yeah, so thank you for the reminder. So we, the local teams have also been involved in setting up tents for bike to wherever day. So like in places where there's high bicycle traffic, we'll set up a table, set up a tent and tell people about the Bikes School Coalition, tell people about the local teams and I think we've been able to be pretty successful with that. And finally, I lead free bicycle repair events in my free time and so we've done like eight of them, fixed 328 bikes so far. Yeah. And one of the really awesome things about being under the Silicon Valley Bikes School Coalition system is that we're using their Eventbrite system. So I mean, A, we don't have to pay for that and B, we can actually really easily copy over events because they're like the registration system, we just copy it for like two, for the next event each time and we can also duplicate it for other cities. So for example, in San Mateo, Ryan and his team created their own free bike repair event in San Mateo and they fixed quite a lot of bikes on their first event, it was very impressive. Next slide. So as a team leader, I've learned a couple of very important lessons that apply to both bicycle advocacy and life. Reputation and relationships really matter. It's really important to keep those relationships good with council members, even the ones that you disagree with and keeping a strong reputation of the local team and preserving the good reputation of the Silicon Valley Bike School Coalition as well. We learn to pick and choose our battles, not if the city staff says this is physically impossible, we're not going to follow that campaign obviously. Making partnerships is really important as well. So for example, reaching out to the PTA if we're trying to put a bike lane somewhere and there's a school nearby, getting the support of the PTA, getting the support of other local advocacy groups that are maybe involved in climate change or housing is really helpful to bring together a coalition. We celebrate every win, even the small ones, because a bicycle project might only come to council every three months or something. And so that's part of why we do monthly rides to keep people excited and keep people engaged. And so I'm leaving into fall unfortunately. So I've created a transition plan for the next team leader. So I've written out a whole document of what I've learned, the things that team leaders need to do and documenting all of that so the next person can take over and run it smoothly. Yeah, Omar, do you wanna talk a little more? Yeah, I'll touch on a couple other things before we transition off of Sunnyvale. But let's give it up for Ari again. I mean, that was fantastic. You know, I think just two of the other things I wanted to touch on is another story of a success that Bikes Sunnyvale has had. And again, I think just for more context for everyone, I'm only on the other side of the equation. So a lot of this is learning for me where I'm like, ah, that's what you all are doing. And now I'm taking my notes, and now I know, just kidding. But no, but it really is like, it's interesting to see this model from the other end because I can tell you about how effective it really is. And that's kind of what I alluded to with the Sunnyvale have story. And so I think another good story is, the reason you need to be so granular is each city has its own policy process. And sometimes when you're not doing local politics work, it's hard to see that. But just because, yeah, at the state level, everything is so homogenous in terms of, if you have a bill, it goes through these committees and it goes this way, yada, yada, yada. Each city does it very differently. And so in Sunnyvale, we have what's called our study issue process. And so for any major policy changes or major infrastructure builds, we have a very specific process of how those go through. And at the beginning of the year, all of the different study issues from bike infrastructure to universal basic income to police policy, all of them are ranked according to the city's ability to actually do them this year based off of our resources. And so that ranking process is super important and it's also very controversial. And so one of the benefits of the local team model is when we were going through that ranking process this year, one of the study issues that had been, I think created by the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission was for Hollenbeck Ave, which is another North-South one. It's an important corridor that goes from very dense single-family zoned area into schools, into some of the shopping areas. And it connects to some of the other main corridors. And so there was a study issue to put a bike lane on there because there was none at the moment. And it ended up getting onto, not only was it being low ranked, it was set to be completely cut off and say, you know what, we're just killing the study issue entirely, it's not gonna move forward. Bike Sunnyvale got one of it and they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. So they were able to meet with all the council members and come in with a very specific ask of, well, instead of just approving it, let's also focus on the strategy of this year. Let's get it off the chopping block, okay? Like, you know, take it from nothing to at least being deferred till next year, which is, you know, it might not seem like the biggest ask, but if you're not at that granular level of strategy, then you're gonna totally lose it. You know, you're gonna come in with unrealistic ask. And so through their lobbying efforts and through meeting with council members and actually getting stakeholders who were, you know, affected by it, they were able to turn that tide and I think it ended up getting ranked this year and not getting completely killed. So that was huge and such a testament to why the model works. And then the other thing I just wanted to mention too is, and Ari mentioned this point as well, that importance of sort of the human and social aspect of it all, you know, it really is sad to say, but elected officials are human and there are good things about that, right? But, yeah, all of the fallacies that come with it are also there. You know, they're emotional creatures, sometimes the most emotional creatures with the biggest egos in the room. And so understanding how to play that and understanding how to actually build relationships with each of those is so important because things as simple as having those events, you know, inviting all of the electives, getting them to be partners and getting them invested really shows up months later when you're on the dais because it impacts that framework that I've seen each of my colleagues have where, you know, after they've gotten to Bikes Sunnyvale events, after they're actually biking alongside the advocates and they see them not as, you know, an us and them relationship, or an us versus them relationship, but as it's been, you know, an and relationship, it changes that dynamic significantly and makes so many of these victories so much more possible. So shout out to Bikes Sunnyvale for everything they do. Thank you. Thanks, Omar, who can pass it off to Ryan now for his same tail. For sure. And really shout out to Omar as well for truly all the wonderful work that you're doing in Sunnyvale and to have an elected official come here and like support bike advocacy in an open forum is something that should be acknowledged and it excites me and I'm just happy to see that, you know, we have folks who we can work with, you know, up and down the peninsula. So thank you. And Ryan heard my statement about elected officials having egos, so good job. I have to practice for San Mateo because, and yeah, so I guess, so my name's Ryan. I grew up on the peninsula in Hillsborough and I live right next to San Mateo. So there's this city that is very bikeable in nature that I grew up next to and became a transit nerd, you know, really love public transit and active transportation. And I like to say that I learned how to read by like just reading all the street signs and roadway signs and nerding out on maps about transit systems and bikeways and, you know, cities around the world that are much better than here. And I think what's interesting is that as someone who got slightly involved with SVBC prior to the local team model, I've been able to see how kind of the advocacy impact has changed before and after. So I'd say roughly in like 2015 or 2016, I was in high school and I was interested in a bike share system that the city of San Mateo was piloting and bringing those bikes to the high school that I was going to. So that was kind of my first foray into advocacy. As a high schooler, I wasn't super successful but I got practice meeting with the city staff and talking through the issue. And the city staff were actually the ones who connected me to SVBC. And I thought that was interesting. So I got connected with some of Sandia's former colleagues and I essentially went to events. But what I noticed is that the footprint of the organization wasn't super big. Like they helped table at one event but it wasn't necessarily like something that a lot of people knew about. But it was better than nothing, right? And I just saw how completely that has changed with having this local team model of dedicated bikedivists who have a local understanding and the hyper local interest in that specific area. So since then we've been able to have regular monthly meetings and monthly rides since I got back into it in roughly 2020 coming back from college during the pandemic. And I was able to kind of see how great it is to have a parent organization to help support you technically, resources, advice, relationships with elected officials and of course a large email list that also helps to push forward more change. So a little bit about our group. We are roughly like, one thing I like about advocacy is you can have a small group of dedicated folks and have an outsized impact. So we are actually just, I would say like five to 10 dedicated members with a larger email list that we turn out to meetings. But the people who are in and out every day thinking about this, it's about five to 10 people. So some of our campaigns have been regarding adding bike lanes into the city. So there was a recent campaign to implement bike lanes on two segments of street in San Mateo that are responsible for 30% of all bike-related collisions in the city and it required the removal of 214 parking spaces in a part of the city with high parking demand, with roughly 85% usage of the parking spaces on that street. So it was a very tough lift. It required five months of additional advocacy and outreach, reaching out to council members, getting petitions. There was a very active opposition that got us 700 signatures on a petition against removing the bike lanes. And it required us to dig deep, go into the technical arguments, explain how actually if you removed the 214 parking spaces, the expected additional blocks that folks would have to walk to find parking was roughly one to two blocks. So not the end of the world, not ideal, but there are other parking mitigation solutions that you can come up with, like residential parking permit programs, allowing driveway parking in front of driveway aprons for residents and making use of empty parking lots at night because overnight parking was the issue for this neighborhood. There are other things we can do and still accommodate bike lanes. And it was hard to get that message out, but we kept on hammering it. And after five months of meeting new people and getting involved with the project, we were able to, by the slimmest of margins, pass that at the city council. So there are now, but there will be bike lanes in the near future on those segments of road. So it was a tough lift, but it really helped me see what the potential is for just one person to change things and I can honestly say it's one of the most satisfying feelings to look at a project or look at an infrastructure change and see that without you being there or without your group being there, that would not have happened. And sometimes when looking for purpose, it becomes very gratifying. So that's something that the local team model has definitely given me. And it's also through that process, we learned about how to kind of engage with council members, which I think is very useful in a city where removing parking is controversial. Let me look at my notes here. So a little bit about our organization structure. So we have a slightly different model from Sunnyvale in terms of we have three team co-leads. Ari is like, we look up to Ari in terms of like how to do things and are always asking him like, does your website look like like bike repair events? Like there's so many things that through the local team model of connecting with other teams around the area, we're able to get that experience and build off of the experiences of others and Ari has just been like fundamentally amazing in terms of helping us grow our team. So also a shout out, really big shout out to Ari. Yeah. In terms of communication, so communication has been one of our issues, but I actually think that the pandemic helped us grow our team in that regard. Number one, the bike-tivist forums that SVBC puts on are truly amazing and have helped drive people interested to one join SVBC, but then also come into the local team afterwards. And because it's on Zoom, it's like, it's a webinar, you can just go check out if you're interested. And while in-person events are important and engaging, this helps get those folks who might not necessarily come out to an in-person event, but who might have their interest peaked in some policy issue area, and then they come to the local team meeting and have those personal connections, which are also on Zoom right after the bike-tivist forum. So that's super useful. So we do most of our communication in meetings like that, and then asynchronously over two different forums. So we use Google Groups and then Slack. And I'd say one of the ways that we've been able to help grow the team is just by developing that online presence and being able to turn out people rapidly through, by basically blasting to our dedicated members on Slack for smaller issues and then blasting to the entire Google Group, which has about 60 or 70 folks when there are other issues. And for example, on the bike lane project I was speaking about, we were able to turn out roughly 20 people, 20 to 30 people to three different meetings over the course of five months, which was fun. So it definitely was interesting. Some other things that we do is we have monthly rides that serve to generate interest and foster membership. We did a bike repair event and were able to, with Ari's help, fix about 50 plus bikes. And that was our first one. And people were like, whoa, what's happening? And it really helps having those events establish yourself as a presence that council members and other folks start thinking you're a little more official. With that, there are challenges in the sense that the more official you seem, the more politically savvy people expect you to be. And for volunteers who are ready to complain regularly about other things to city councils, it's been a learning experience that we have to learn how to be politically tactful, especially because there are council members who maybe while they might be more naturally inclined to support bicycle and pedestrian projects, they aren't always going to vote in our favor for a lot of the reasons that Omar has said and you don't say. You don't say and I'm sure it's not a surprise to anyone. And because of that, it's important, I would say one thing we've learned is both, how are you gracious in defeat, but also gracious in victory when there are a lot of people who are pissed off at something that you've done and a lot of council members who are unhappy with the way a vote has gone, but how do you maintain those relationships? Because in the end, you still need them. Like we still have a lot of work that we want to do and want those council members to come to our side in the future. Some other things that are on our mind is how can we, like it's very hard to mobilize four campaigns consistently, which we want to do. We are volunteers. So how can we get the city to help us a bit more, which is it's a big aspect that we've benefited is by having relationships with city staff members and making allies within the city bureaucracy in addition to council members. So getting pointers from city staff in terms of why is something happening this way or like what are the technical reasons behind you recommending this project or this configuration? For example, on our bike lanes, you were like, why can't you have protected bike lanes? And they're like, well, the road's not wide enough. If you did that, you would have to convert to one ways and you'd have to do all these traffic studies and actually more people are gonna get mad about your project than less. So it's good to have a city perspective while also pushing back on the city perspective when they're like, oh, that's not quote unquote feasible, which they like to say a lot, which is quite annoying. So yeah, so I guess what I've learned is that you can have love-hate relationships with staff and council members, but always be gracious and have a working relationship with them. Let's see, so yeah, so SVBC really does provide a lot of that support that has helped us grow, certainly. And I think for an all-volunteer group, it's important to have that to keep on, at least continue providing an ecosystem for folks to meet even if there are lulls in the advocacy. So yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to say. I guess another big thing that we're working on and definitely welcome support from a parent group that's where I think this model is especially successful is how to get dedicated funding for bike pet improvements to get the city basically to help us because we don't have that. And right now in San Mateo, and through that we had to learn how to go through the city planning process. Omar was talking about how they have the issue areas process in Sunnyvale and in San Mateo they have a blue sky goal setting process where they come up with a strategic work plan and it's like this process that's relatively shrouded in mystery. We don't know what's gonna happen and it's just like what is happening here and why was this sentence of this goal taken out between this draft and the second draft of your strategic plan? And I think that going into it, we really learned that we have to be on top of it starting like months in advance and through that work of understanding our city's planning process, we were able to get one line added into one of the goals to start the process of identifying a dedicated funding source for these bicycle and pedestrian projects. Yes, so yeah, you can clap but that's just step one and then like getting the support for whatever policy to actually institute said identified funding source whether it requires a campaign, a ballot measure or something is something that I will be thinking about in the next couple of years as well as our general plan update and how we implement policies and programs to make our city more like Barcelona. What the funny thing is in our general plan a process, they're like, oh, we should do super blocks like Barcelona and I'm like great, like that's a great idea. Thank you for putting it out there but like let's flush it out and actually make sure that we have an idea of what this alternative is. So we can get something we're excited about to then move it forward. And so I think that for us working with SVBC to understand these more city bureaucratic processes can get a lot of bang for your buck down the line when hopefully in the future San Mateo has a dedicated funding source instead of the paltry amount relatively that is funded compared to roadway projects which is just a common theme across our region and across the US. And then also how do we get more pro bike other policies like unbundling parking costs from housing or office space and things like that. So yeah, so that's all I have. Thank you. So that's all we have on the presentation side and we're open for Q and A. I can pass the mic around. Thank you so much for that great presentation. What do you do when staff, which is one of the.