The Not-So-Powerful Enterprise

Daniel Barnes
Aug 23, 2017 · 7 min read
A shared-lane street marking indicating where cyclists should be on the road.

Greg Billing is a bike lobbyist. His is not the image that springs to mind when you think of a lobbyist. He wears a fleece rather than an a thousand dollar suit and sports a light brown beard instead of being clean shaven. His organization’s office is spacious and attractive on the inside, featuring a large wall adorned with the hanging bikes of staff members, yet is a far cry from K street on the outside. The office is located on the ground floor of a condo building, across the street from the future location of a Popeye’s, less than 5 minutes away from the center of Adams Morgan. It has no underground parking garage although that likely doesn’t concern the staff of 16, except for the lone one who drives to work.

“I think the term bike lobby has been co-opted by the bicycle advocacy movement as a little bit of a running joke,” says Billing, 32, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. “When you look at the food lobby or the automotive industry, these are very well financed major institutions and organizations that are representing these interests. So yeah, we have a bike lobby, but it’s small, grassroots, scrappy organizations that are scraping together resources and political power to try and make the streets safe.”

Small, grassroots and scrappy may be the boring truth about the bike lobby, but perhaps it’s most well-known characterization painted a starkly different picture. In May 2013, New York City launched its bike share program: Citi Bike. The system operated the same as any other bike share system; take a bike out of one station and return it to any station once you’ve reached your destination. This wasn’t the first system of its kind, but the amount of press that it got was responsible for shoving bike share systems into the limelight. The program came with a fair number of critics, but none drew as much mockery as Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Dorothy Rabinowitz after her rant, in an online video, that the bike sharing system was the product of then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “totalitarian” government and that the “bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise.” All-powerful the bike lobby is assuredly not.

Founded in 1972, WABA was designed to address the problems that plague commuter cyclists. The organization wasn’t the first of its kind, other bicycle groups already existed in the Washington area, but at the time of its founding, it was uniquely positioned to take the lead in advocating for bicycle issues on a local and national level. Over time, WABA’s focus narrowed, making them the locally minded organization they are today. The oldest bicycling advocacy organization in the United States seems to be The League of American Bicyclists. Formerly the League of American Wheelmen, the League was founded in 1880 to advocate for paved roads in a time where horses and wagons were still popular forms of travel. The League’s website boasts the Wright Brothers and John D. Rockefeller as some of its early members. At the time that WABA was founded, the League had yet to rename itself or move to Washington, D.C. The move eventually happened in 1997 to facilitate “working with the government.”

Since those early days, bicycle advocacy organizations have had many victories big and small. The League takes credit for getting the roads paved, but many smaller victories are just as important in the eyes of those who do this work. For instance, the D.C. Council recently passed the Motor Vehicle Collision Recovery Act of 2016, a result that Billing says legislators have directly credited to over two years of work by WABA.

“What this bill does is in cases where a driver and a bicyclist or pedestrian are involved in a crash, it does not bar the pedestrian or bicyclist from recovering damages in circumstances where they might be partially at fault,” Billing says. Before this bill was passed, Washington, D.C.’s negligence standard allowed insurance companies to deny coverage to bicyclists and pedestrians struck by drivers if the bicyclist or pedestrian was greater than “1 percent at fault.”

“It’s totally unfair and not the law in 46 other states,” says Billing. “So D.C. was actually really far behind in having this change in the law. We got that law introduced and then we were there every step of the way, educating the public about it and working with the press.”

The methods of the “bike lobby” don’t really follow the stereotype of shady backroom deals and big payoffs that have come to represent lobbyists in many minds. Most bicycle advocacy groups are 501(c)(3) nonprofits which grants them exemption from paying federal income tax, but limits their lobbying activities such that no “substantial part” of their activity can go to lobbying.

“It’s not lobbying in the sense of putting lots of money in people’s pockets or supporting things that way,” says Steve Taylor, communications manager for the League. “But we do have a lot of work to take a very close look at how biking helps not just cyclists, but people across the board.”

In the case of the League, lobbying efforts are done via a legislative director who spends time on Capitol Hill and providing ordinary people with tools and education to help them lobby for themselves. Taylor estimates the split between the two is “about half and half.” Empowering people to be their own lobbyist becomes exceedingly literal during the National Bike Summit, the League’s biggest event of the year which takes place in Washington, D.C. During the Summit, the League holds “Lobby Day” which is a free event open to anyone where the League will arrange appointments for registrants with their representatives and senators or staff.

“We put a lot of effort into giving people the tools — and we obviously do a lot of work ourselves, to do the research and do polls to find out what people feel about biking and to get the point across — but for us, one of our most, if not our most important role, is to give these individuals and advocacy groups across the country the tools to do that work because that’s what really makes a difference,” Taylor says.

The League has a strictly national focus, but in some cases they will provide assistance to smaller groups around the country. Much of this assistance is in the form of trainings that inform people how to be better communicators when talking to their representatives on a local or national level. But none of that help is needed at WABA.

“There are smaller groups around the country that perhaps require more support than WABA does,” Taylor says. “They have a fantastic staff and do a fantastic job. One of the stronger groups in the country.”

Other local advocacy groups readily acknowledge the dominance of WABA in the realm of bike advocacy. The Coalition for Smarter Growth is non-profit with goals similar to that of WABA, but with a broader scope than just bikes. Created to “promote walkable, inclusive, and transit-oriented communities,” the Coalition is in a position to be a leading advocate for bicycle friendly laws and infrastructure if WABA did not exist.

“Most of their mission is related around bikes, so because there’s organizations like WABA, we dabble with bikes — it’s absolutely part of our mission — but not as much a part of our everyday work,” says Clair Jaffe, communications manager for the Coalition. “They do such a good job with it that we’re often not as needed.” The Coalition will often express their support for WABA on advocacy campaigns, but little material support is ever needed.

The public misperception of the bike lobby and the people in it is a constant source of amusement for Billing.

“It’s funny when stories or project get blown out of proportion that somehow taking a street that has parking and four lanes of traffic, the idea that converting one of those to a protected bike lane is somehow destroying the social fabric of our world,” he says.

According to Billing, most people realize that WABA’s goals are fairly modest and reasonable once they actually get to know the organization. WABA isn’t proposing anything radical, Billing says.

“Radical would be like, Columbia road? No cars,” he says gesturing towards the major road that runs outside the WABA office. “That would be radical. You can’t park there, you can’t drive there. The only thing that’s coming on Columbia road is people walking in the street, busses and bikes. That’s radical and we have not proposed that anywhere.”

Radical ideas or not, Billing sees great progress being made by WABA in the Washington region. Washington, D.C. is now has over 7 miles of protected bike lanes and people want more.

“People see them, we have data that shows they work, they attract more people to ride, they’re safer, residents like them once they’re in. We now have plans that have networks of them. We’re at this point where we’re not making those arguments, what we’re trying to do is figure out how to build them faster,” Billing says. “We’ve unlocked that infrastructure and thinking and now there’s a lot of people demanding it.”

Working for change is an uphill battle and Greg Billing can’t just enact edicts at his dictatorial whim. Being all-powerful would be nice, but even without totalitarian authority, the bike lobby is making itself known.

“We are actually changing the community and addressing some really big issues of our time,” Billing says. “Certainly the climate change issue, transportation and mobility and just how cities are able to reinvent themselves but also kinda adapt to their rising popularity and populations. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing because it’s not working so we need to give people more options. Here we get to work in our local community with our neighbors — for better or worse — and the changes that we’re working on are achievable and tangible and we get to see them and enjoy them and see how they change the communities and change people’s lives. So that’s pretty rewarding.”

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade