Six Things to Prepare for a Successful 2018
This month CalBike is publishing six articles to help you bring more joy into your life in 2018. Each post will bring a new suggestion for supporting our movement to make our communities more equitable, inclusive and prosperous where bicycling enables more people to live joyful and healthy lives.
Today we emphasize the deepest aspect of our work—social justice—which is central to the new Strategic Plan we adopted in 2017 and unveiled at the California Bicycle Summit. Second, we’ll highlight some volunteer campaigns you can work on to meet people and make a difference. Third, we’ll discuss taking control of your streets. Then we’ll introduce you to your local advocacy organization and your statewide advocacy organization (us). Finally, we’ll close the series in a fun way: an enticement to join us on the California Dream Ride.
Our new Strategic Plan highlights the reason we advocate for bicycling; it’s not about the bike. It’s about our communities and the people who live in them. It’s about living joyful and healthy lives in equitable, inclusive, and prosperous communities. We emphasize bicycling as the means to that end—a particularly wonderful means, in fact—but it’s the goal that matters.
Because we are confident that most people like bikes, our work in 2018 will include a great deal of base-building aimed at giving residents a greater voice in how transportation decisions are made. It means listening to local community organizations and working with them to strengthen their power, even on issues beyond bicycling. For example, residents sometimes oppose bike lanes as harbingers of gentrification and displacement, so you might see us supporting efforts to improve tenant protections. We also plan to engage in structural reforms of transportation agencies to improve their responsiveness to community demands. More democracy in our transportation policy decisions will mean better decisions.
These are some of our ambitious goals for the next five years. They also include preparing for autonomous vehicles, mandating bike infrastructure when streets are repaved, and helping people and businesses convert car trips to electric bike trips. We detailed our full strategic plan at the California Bicycle Summit in October, and we can’t wait to share about how we’re making than plan a reality in 2018.
