What is Advocacy All About?

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Bicycle advocacy is about people. Good advocacy brings people together in pursuit of common goals. It builds solid professional relationships and deep friendships. It provides meaning to the lives of those it touches and enables us to leave our mark on this earth.

Bicycle advocacy is about rescuing our communities. Our cities, suburbs, countryside and neighborhoods are suffering from five decades of auto-based development and the resulting sprawl which threatens to swallow our open space and farmland. What could be valuable leisure or family time is wasted with hour-long commutes. Neighborhood roads are frequently designed to facilitate high-speed auto traffic at the expense of bicyclists and pedestrians.

Bicycle advocacy is about reclaiming public space from deadly, dirty motorized machines. Bicycling is human-scale activity which nurtures community life, and bicycle advocacy reminds people that each of us has a role to play in improving the quality-of-life in our communities.

Bicycle advocacy is about health. Americans are exercising less and less. We have become enslaved by our commutes and addicted to television. Youth obesity rates are at all-time high. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying prematurely due to their poor diet and failure to exercise regularly. Bicycling is a big part of the answer, and the increasing acknowledgment of that by the public health community offers new opportunities for bicycle advocates. This tool kit is proof of that!

But most of all...bicycle advocacy is about bicycling! Since you're reading this, chances are you've already figured out that bicycling is a wonderful form of recreation and transportation. The primary focus of bicycle advocacy should be on improving conditions for bicycling.

What do bicyclists want? The goals of bicycle advocacy can be broken down into four categories:

• Better roads--Roughly 80% of bicycling is done on public roads, and ensuring that roads are designed, constructed, maintained and rehabilitated in way that reasonably accommodates bicyclists is the primary purpose of bicycle advocacy.
• Better bicyclists--In America, there is a pervasive lack of understanding about how bicyclists should act on public roads. Activities, promotions and publications can encourage bicyclists to use their bicycles in a safe, vehicular manner.
• Better motorists--Having better-trained and more considerate motorists would encourage more bicycling and reduce risks to bicyclists. Educating motorists about bicyclists' right to use the roads is a very important aspect of bicycle advocacy. Working to remove dangerous motorists from the roadways is also a legitimate end of bicycle advocacy.
• More trails--Trails provide a comfortable bicycling environment for many users. Trails and other connectors are especially valuable in bridging freeways, rivers, or other barriers and avoiding dangerous intersections.

• more competent bicyclists who understand their rights and responsibilities and can safely navigate their way along streets and trails,
• broader acceptance by motorists of bicyclists as legitimate road users, and
• a society which embraces and encourages bicycling as a safe, healthy and fun activity worthy of investment in terms of facility design, education and promotion.