Advocacy Win! Bike Sunnyvale gets bicycling to be a city priority in 2021
The Sunnyvale 2020 ATP including the bike plan will be a council strategic policy priority in 2021.Guest blog: Ari Feinsmith, SVBC’s Bike Sunnyvale team leader [website]Last year, the City of Sunnyvale approved its Active Transportation Plan (ATP), which includes many fantastic potential projects for pedestrians, bicyclists, and the Safe Routes to School program in Sunnyvale. Unfortunately, the plan does not include a schedule for implementation. One of Bike Sunnyvale’s 2021 campaign goals is to push the city to implement the ATP quickly, so last month we undertook a huge advocacy effort ─ including sending 40 letters to the City Council and partnering with numerous organizations ─ to get the city to prioritize active transportation. Here is how we did it.Our strategy was to get “Implement the Active Transportation Plan” added to the Sunnyvale City Council’s Strategic Policy Priorities (SPPs). Two SPP examples are “Complete the Downtown” and “Accelerate the Climate Action Plan”. This SPP list is important because it is used by the city manager as a guide to determine where to dedicate staff time and city resources in the coming years. It impacts what gets funded in the FY 2021/22 budget and beyond. As of last year, there were 6 strategic policy priorities, and the team’s goal was to have “Implement the Active Transportation Plan” added as a stand-alone priority or added to one of the existing priorities at the City Council meeting on January 28th, 2021. To start, the Bike Sunnyvale team met with Councilmember Russ Melton, who educated us about the Strategic Policy Priorities process. We created a list of tactics to help us achieve our goal:
Have residents send emails to City Council
Get organizations to sign our letter
Meet with City Councilmembers to discuss our goals
Speak at Sunnyvale City Council meetings
Tactic 1 - Have residents send emails to City Council
Sunnyvale website to make it easy to write letters to city council
Our first tactic was to get many Sunnyvale residents to send letters to the city council sharing their support for adding the ATP to the priority list. In order to get numerous people to send letters, the letter-writing process had to be convenient and fast, so I set up a website where residents could send a one-click email to the city council. It was important that the emails were diverse, so we wrote 4 separate template emails for residents to send and we encouraged them to personalize them further.These buttons use an HTML “mailto:” link. All emails were bcc’ed to me so I could track them and see our progress. Once the website went live, the team shared it on social media sites such as Nextdoor and Facebook. Our social media posts highlighted ATP projects that would benefit bicyclists and pedestrians (such as the East Channel Trail) so that many people would send letters. We got 40 letters sent in 2 weeks!
Tactic 2 -Getting other orgs onboard
Advocacy efforts work best when a coalition of different organizations come together and ask for the same thing. We created a sign-on letter and put it in a Google form for organizations to sign. Then we lobbied those organizations to sign our letter. Many notable organizations and businesses signed on, including Sunnyvale Democratic Club, Livable Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action, Sunnyvale Youth Climate Action Team, Trail Head Cyclery, Sunnyvale Cupertino Cycling Club, and Stanford Research Park Bicycle Champions.
Tactic 3 -Meet with Councilmembers
Our third tactic was to meet with Sunnyvale City Councilmembers to discuss our goals. Team members met with five of the seven Councilmembers before the meeting on Jan 28th.
Tactic 4 -Speak during the event
Our fourth and final tactic was to speak during the public comment section of City Council meetings. We had more than 8 speakers voice support. At the last opportunity for public comment on the morning of January 28th, we presented a slide to the city council summarizing our request.
Success! The City Council voted 6-1 to amend an existing Strategic Policy Priority
Although the city council didn’t add "Implement the Active Transportation Plan" specifically, their amendment is even better. Sunnyvale has multiple walking and biking safety plans (the ATP, the Vision Zero Plan, and the Roadway Safety Plan), and this language enables all of them to be considered as being one of the SPPs.Before: Ability of Infrastructure to Support Development & TrafficAfter: Ability of Infrastructure to Support Development & Traffic & Active TransportationThis advocacy success probably would not have happened without our hard work. We will have more hurdles in the future, but this is a monumental step in the right direction. Go team!