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We’ve got a parade of new, but familiar, faces taking the helm of Alliance organizations in 2011. Many of you know Dave Snyder from his frequent role as the expert facilitator of our Winning Campaigns Trainings. But now that he’s the executive director of the revitalized California Bicycle Coalition, we wondered what he’s been up to in recent years and what winning ideas he has planned for the Golden State.

When and how did you first get involved in bike-ped issues way back in the day? 

I got involved on Earth Day 1990, when I decided that bicycling promotion was a good way to channel my activism. I published a newsletter (this was pre-world wide web) to facilitate communication among the various flavors of bicycle activists and coordinated them under the name of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, an organization that had gone legally defunct after its 1971 founding but was being maintained in name, at least, by one stalwart dedicated activist.

Anyone who’s been to an Alliance Winning Campaigns Training knows you’ve had many and varied successes in your long career; what was the very first campaign you worked on?

It was one I wouldn’t have worked on if I had had the training! Highway One between Stinson Beach and Mill Valley had closed due to mudslides. It became a beautiful bike ride: We fought to keep it closed to cars forever. It would have been amazing but utterly un-winnable and not exactly on message or mission in any case. We had fun, though!

You grew the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition into a powerhouse organization; what’s one of your best memories or biggest lessons learned from those years?

Turning out about 150 people to a hearing on the citywide bicycle network, and coordinating the testimony to make an incredibly strong statement about the need for the network.

I’m assuming you left SFBC to start Livable City? Why? What else have you been up to since SFBC?

Creating bicycle habitat by changing land use is equally, if not more, important than adding bike facilities to streets, as it also can make housing more affordable and therefore especially improve the lives of lower income people. After I passed Livable City on to another great leader I decided to work for the Alliance for Biking & Walking (then the Thunderhead Alliance) as the Director of Program Development. After that I served a stint as the Transportation Policy Director of a local think tank called San Francisco Planning & Urban Research, and most recently as the project director of yet another startup organization: the San Francisco Transit Riders Union.

What are some of the successes of the California Bicycle Coalition that you’ll be building on in 2011?

California started the Safe Routes to School movement and was the first large state to adopt a complete streets policy. We’ll build on that by working to ensure the complete streets policy is implemented, and that the California delegation to Congress voices strong support for the federal safe routes to school program.

California often pushes the envelope for the rest of the country on progressive issues like transportation and energy. Do you see CBC helping to advance that reputation on the bike-ped front?

I think that we can work with our new governor, Jerry Brown, to create a transportation policy for the state that can be a model for reauthorization of the federal bill. Brown is known as a frugal, practical leader, and California’s challenges in transportation policy — huge deficits coupled with extreme difficulty in raising taxes — call for creative solutions that the rest of the country can learn from.

You took the helm of the SFBC back in 1991; now you’re taking over the CBC in 2010. How has the national/state/local atmosphere change? How does this gig feel different?

I think that state level advocacy is so different from local advocacy that it’s hard to say what’s different. There are communities in California that are no more advanced than San Francisco was in 1991, so for those communities, there’s little difference. Except for this: There’s a general acceptance at all levels of government and among a majority of the population that bicycling is a realistic transportation option for some people. It used to never occur to policy makers that bicycling mattered. The implications of this are huge, because a supportive context can allow a community to become more bicycle-friendly in much less time than it took us in the early ‘90s. Fresno, California, has made as much progress in the past two years as San Francisco has made in a whole decade. Also, the example of New York City shows that supportive policy makers can utterly transform a city and do it quickly.

I look at this job from two perspectives. One, I’m going to simply try to do my job well and make sure the CBC plays its part as a player on the larger team: the federal effort, state efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and reform transportation policy, and strengthen local efforts. Second, I’m looking for the big win, but I’m not sure what that is, yet. Age has not made me more patient. If anything, it’s done the opposite, because I’ve seen 20 years of bicycle activism increase bike to work rates from about 1 percent to about 4 percent. I want to see 10 percent or 20 percent and I don’t want it to take another 20 years!

Excited to be back to bike-specific advocacy?

Heck yes.

Keep up with Snyder’s effort on the CBC website. Photo from Bike Commute Tips Blog.