If your New Year resolutions included a greater commitment to civic engagement, find out when and where your local bike advisory committees meet. If your town or county doesn’t have a BPAC, find something applicable like a traffic committee or even the planning commission. Start showing up to your city council meetings. Make some noise. Hand out suggested solutions instead of just being that annoying crazy person who spends his allotted three minutes speaking into the microphone with random rants and insults.
Note: The photo shows a Santa Cruz County BPAC meeting because I don’t have any decent South Bay BPAC meeting photos. Unless you know what your BPAC meeting attendance look like, don’t gripe about their lack of effectiveness or your city’s failure to improve cyclist safety. When you can jam a standing room crowd of 150 cyclists into a council meeting chamber, you too can see 10% of your county transportation budget spent on bike facilities.
This list of bicycle / pedestrian advisory committees and similar for the 15 cities in Santa Clara County, California is a quick reference for me, but hopefully helpful to you too.
Government websites seem to change a lot; if you see a dead link please ping me by leaving a comment here. BPAC = “Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee” (or commission); BAC = “Bicycle Advisory Committee” (or commission).
South Bay City bicycle advisory committees and commissions.
- Campbell BPAC.
- Cupertino Bicycle Pedestrian Commission.
- Gilroy Bicycle Pedestrian Commission.
- Los Altos BPAC.
- Los Altos Hills doesn’t have a BPAC. Equivalent functions performed by Pathways Committee and Traffic Safety Committee, but only when cyclists show up at their meetings.
- Los Gatos BAC.
- Milpitas BPAC (which seems to have a wonderfully diverse membership, BTW).
- Monte Sereno.
- The city of Morgan Hill has a “Bicycle & Trails Advisory Committee” but the entity doesn’t seem to have an online presence.
- Mountain View BPAC.
- Palo Alto Bicycle Advisory Committee (PABAC)
- San Jose BPAC.
- Santa Clara BAC.
- Saratoga Pedestrian, Equestrian and Bicycle Trails Committee. See also Traffic Safety Commission.
- Sunnyvale BPAC, which is probably the most aggressive BPAC in the South Bay. They ask a lot of their city council and, often as not, get what they want.
Other agency bicycle advisory committees.
- The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) operates public transportation and handles transportation planning for Santa Clara County. VTA BPAC meets at VTA HQ on north 1st Street in San Jose on a roughly monthly basis.
- If you like to see democracy in action, visit a Caltrain Bicycle Advisory Committee. Better yet, visit a Caltrain board meeting when bikes are on the agenda for raucous fun. I’m serious.
- Caltrans District 4 Bicycle Advisory Committee. Quarterly meetings take place at District 4 HQ in Oakland. District 4 covers the entire Bay Area.
The link to the Mountain View BPAC goes to the Morgan Hill BPAC. Mountain View BPAC link should be
http://www.mountainview.gov/city_council/bcc/bicycle_pedestrian.asp
Oops! Thank you, and fixed now.
Timely post. I’ll go to my local meeting tonight. The Palo Alto link goes to the well named old website. The poorly named new website location is http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=497&TargetID=288
Thanks for the shout out for Sunnyvale’s BPAC. I was on the commission for 8 years and a big help was the very professional staff the city has hired. We didn’t get everything we wanted and there is much left to get done. The wheels grind slowly but they are moving forward. I wished more cylists would show up at the meetings and at council meetings to express the desire for safer streets.
Was glad I went to the Tuesday night meeting in Palo Alto. I’ll echo Ralph’s comments that the city staff really tries to take input from various constituents to build great projects with the resources that are available. There is a rich history of bicycle advocacy in Palo Alto. It was good to take part. I hope to show up at a council meeting as well.