Biketivist Forum V Safer Streets via Vision Zero

AdvocacyFeaturedLocal teamssafe streets for allVision Zero

May 6

The fifth Biketivist Forum was another great success with over 50 participants! Thank you to all our amazing members and supporters for making time in busy mid-week schedules for coming together to advocate for better bike infrastructure and policies.

The concept behind Biketivist forums is to bring local advocates together at the same time,encourage interaction and cross-learning between teams and members, promote and build new leaders, and make teams more effective at advocating for local improvements and bike-friendly policies.

The first hour was spent learning how to save lives, reduce injuries and encourage more people to walk and bike by making our streets safer. We taught our local Biketivists and supporters to do this by encouraging their city to adopt and fund Vision Zero Plans. The second hour was for the local teams to work on actions in their communities.

A big thank you to Nikita Sinha, Kevin Fehr, Hans Larsen, Jesse Mintz-Roth and Emma Shlaes for educating us about Vision Zero ( Link to presentation and recording of this forum). Making our roads safer via Vision Zero is a longstanding goal of the SVBC. You can read our blogs on the topic here. You can see city-by-city Vision Zero status here.

Please take action to increase funding for your city’s Vision Zero plan if it has one or get them to adopt one if they haven’t. All cities will be releasing their draft budgets for FY21/22 in May and approving them in June.

For the second hour, participants split into breakout rooms based on geography where the team members brainstormed activities to grow their local team. In San Jose, for example, the team decided to reach out to each one of the 150 people subscribed to the San Jose listserve to checkin and see if there are folks who want to help monitor bike projects in their neighborhood. Each team member agreed to take 15 names and is now in the process of sending out emails to each. The goal is to identify 10 more passionate bicyclists in San Jose who want to up their involvement level.

It was another successful event supporting grassroots bicycling advocacy in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. A big SHOUT-OUT to all the wonderful leaders, without whom progress wouldn’t be possible!

Missed Forum IV? Don’t worry – it’s never too late! You can join your local team and the team leader/greeter will bring you up to speed on what they are working on. The presentation and the video from Biktivist IV and previous biktivist forums are linked here.

Biketivist Forum VI will be Wednesday, May 19 at 5 pm. Click here to register. We will have the local team giving us quick updates on their 2021 goals and then extra time to move forward on those goals.

Local team leaders