Interview with Kathy Keehan, executive director of the San Diego Bicycle Coalition

Earlier this summer, I got caught in traffic behind a Prius with a San Diego Bicycle Coalition bumper sticker. I had to roll my eyes; “Honestly, you’re already driving a Prius, do you need to love bikes too?” Then I realized that I love my bike and I also drive a Prius, so I decided to call the phone number on the sticker. I was stuck in traffic, what else was I going to do?

Kathy Keehan, Executive Director, picked up the phone and I talked to her briefly about what the coalition does and how I could help make San Diego more bikeable. I don’t remember the details of the conversation now, but I came away thinking that I wanted to talk to her more in depth and share it with the Internet.

So I did.

The short story is that if you want to help cyclists in San Diego, you can sign up to Bike the Bay on September 7th (it’s the first time in 20 years that people will have been allowed to bike over the Coronado bridge) and/or spend $25 to become a member of the coalition. If you’re too broke to join, but want to help anyway, there are monthly volunteer opportunities as well..

Read on if you want an excellent primer in national and local bike advocacy, a few safety tips, and to find out why on earth a lot of kids in San Diego are prohibited from riding their bikes to school.

Kathy Keehan. Photograph from the Voice of San Diego

So, how long has the San Diego Bicycle Coalition been around?#

Kathy Keehan: 20 years, it’s our 20-year anniversary this year.

Any parties?#

We are planning a big fund-raising gala celebration in October. I don’t have the date exactly yet. We’re looking at October 23rd, but it’s not set yet.

I’ll look out for that. And we already talked about this on the phone, but what do you do?#

I’m the Executive Director, so I do all the staff work that needs to get done, everything from answering the phones to going to meetings. The coalition, itself, is involved in a lot of different advocacy efforts for bicyclists in San Diego. We do everything. We have an education program, called “Bike For Life,” where we do adult and children cycling education classes. We go out to employers and do brown bag seminars during lunchtime, help people get started biking or answer questions. We also do a lot of advocacy work around facilities. We go to SANDAG, the city and the county, and make sure there’s a voice for bicyclists when the decisions are getting made about how are we going to spend the billions of dollars we’re spending for transportation infrastructure? Some of that money needs to get spent for bicycles and pedestrians. So, we go to a lot of boring government meetings.

If cyclists are involved in a crash, we help them find legal advice and help them with their insurance. We do outreach and community activities. We’re holding a big event, a big fund-raiser for us, called “Bike The Bay,” and that’s going to be on September 7th. We actually got Cal Trans to close down the Coronado Bay Bridge, and we’re going to ride over the bridge and around the bike way. So, we’re really excited about that. Take a flyer, tell your friends.

Where do you get your funding?#

Almost all of our funding is memberships. We’re a 501-C3 non-profit organization, so we don’t typically get town money or city money, tax dollars, any of those sorts of things. We’re all membership-driven. We do have a grant right now through the SANDAG and the City of San Diego, to teach our bicyclists education programs, but that will be ending the end of this year.

Pressure’s on!#

Yeah, that’s a little scary.

Could that be renewed or can you get grants from other organizations?#

We’re trying to get funding from some different funding sources for those programs. We’re looking at making them self-sufficient, to start having students pay for the classes or figuring out a way that we can leverage some traffic safety kind of dollars, stuff like that.

I had made the point in my blog post about Ride Your Bike to Work Day that walking shoe companies and bike companies don’t have a strong lobby or political action committee to basically encourage lawmakers to pay attention to making a walkable, bikeable community. I guess the existence of the Bicycle Coalition proves, thankfully, that I was wrong.#

There are a lot of things going on right now, particularly at the Federal level. Every about four or five years, the Federal government does the Federal Highway Bill. So, every time they do that, there’s an opportunity for us to be loud about the needs for bicyclists and pedestrians. We anticipate that this next one coming up will be the best yet for bicyclists and pedestrians. The Chair of the Transportation Committee, Congressman Oberstar, from Minnesota, has been consistently very much supportive of walking and bicycling, and making sure that those modes are represented.

There are organizations like the League Of American Bicyclists, Bikes Belong, which is the bike industry lobbying group and Complete Streets Coalition, which is a group of local organizations, that have come together to make sure in that Highway bill, there’s policy statements that talk about you can’t just build a road and not put sidewalks or bike lanes, the appropriate bike and pedestrian infrastructure. If you’re going to spend those Federal dollars, you have to make sure you’re spending them to benefit everyone, not just the people in cars. So, they’re working on that.

The Safe Routes To School groups have been very active, and I think have gotten a lot of attraction in Washington, D.C. It’s one thing to talk about overall infrastructure, but when you’re talking about kids getting back and forth to school, there is just that much more of a need to be able to make sure they can walk, they can bike, they can be active, rather than creating these huge traffic jams at our schools because all the moms are driving their kids to school every morning. So, all of those folks are fitting together.

We’re actually working with the Rails To Trails folks. There is a push in this next Federal authorization for something called the Active Transportation Campaign. Last time around, there was a pilot program. It was called the Pilot Non-Motorized Transportation Program. And what they did, they gave four communities all over the United States 25 million bucks each, and said, “Do what you have to do to get people out of their cars, onto their bikes, and walking around.” Rails To Trails looked at that and said, “Wow, what a great program.”

It’s working in those four communities. They’re really making a difference and getting people out of their cars. So this time around, we’re going to try for a much bigger program, two billion dollars, all together, 40 cities or communities, 50 million dollars each, which sounds like a lot of money. But then, when you talk about in San Diego, it costs between two, and our most expensive bike path project, two to four million dollars a mile to build a bike path. It is not cheap to build those facilities. 50 million dollars will go a ways. There’s already bike and pedestrian money in the county that we have earmarked for those projects, and we’ll be able to do more with that money. It’s still got to get through the whole Federal process, though, which is scary.

What do you think is driving all this activity? Do gas prices have something to do with it?#

There are so many things that are coming together right now. I think there’s almost a perfect storm of things happening that are really promoting walking and bicycling. Gas prices are certainly a huge piece of it. We’re seeing so many more people riding their bikes and walking and taking transit because gas prices are so high, and they don’t look like they’re going to fall. So, we’re kind of in a permanent state of thinking about how we’re getting around.

The obesity epidemic and the diabetes epidemic have been a huge impetus for people to try and figure out how to incorporate activity into their daily lives. And their commute or their errands, or getting their kids to school can be a solution to that problem, too. If you’re walking to get someplace, you’re combining that exercise and that transportation. You get two for one.

So, there’s those two big things pushing it. But also, you have to give credit, I think, to those national advocacy organizations, who have been working behind the scenes for about 10 years now, to really push the bicycle and pedestrian agenda, so that now, we have legislators, who understand the issues, and who are willing to go to bat for us, who are willing to risk a little political capital to say bicycling is not just this crazy, strange thing. It’s an important piece of our transportation infrastructure, and we need to be spending some money to make sure people can do it. We haven’t for a really long time.

Safe Routes To School, the first thing I think of is that you’re learning to speak lawmakers’ language, in terms that affect their constituents. It helps if they can run for reelection and say, “I’m making the streets safer for your kids.”#

Absolutely.

Whereas, “I’m making the streets safer for those annoying bike pedestrians that you hate driving with” doesn’t resonate with a lot of people. It’s still important, but the phrasing of the argument is essential.#

Well, you have to phrase the language. The difficulty with bicycle advocacy is we have such a broad spectrum of people that we need to serve, everybody from those kindergartners, with their training wheels, riding to kindergarten, to the folks who are doing it for transportation, to the folks who are out there, riding on the weekends because they want to get fit and healthy. Or they’re racing or they just enjoy bicycling. Bicycle tourism is a huge piece of it. Everybody from five to 95 is out there on their bikes.

It’s not a one size fits all solution. You don’t want those fast riders, necessarily, on those bike paths, where you’ve got kids, dogs, strollers and people walking around. We need to provide facilities for those fast bicyclists, who are capable and want to be out in traffic because that’s the fastest, easiest way to get to their destination. But, you also have to provide facilities that are going to work for folks who are either not able or willing to go in traffic. So, there’s this huge range.

And Safe Routes To School, I think, is really a pretty smart, politically clever way of getting the issue into the spotlight. Somewhere in the 1970’s, we made a wrong turn, and we started putting schools on big arterials. We started discouraging kids from riding their bikes to school. In my children’s school districts, you were not allowed to ride your bike to school until you were at least in third grade. My kids were capable of riding their bikes to school when they were kindergarten, first, second-graders. They were forbidden from doing so, even if I was with them, by the school district. So, there are policies and decisions that have been made along the way that seemed like a good idea at the time. We don’t want those kids to get hit, we don’t want anybody to get hurt, so we’re going to tell you not to ride to school. Well now, we have all these little fat kids because they’re riding around in the car all the time, and we didn’t think about that when those policies and rules got implemented.

So, Safe Routes To School, I think, is really an exciting program to attack a bunch of things all at the same time. If you can get those kids out, I mean, it’s about traffic safety and obesity, but it’s about community building. It’s a whole different environment in your neighborhood when kids are walking and biking to school than it is when everybody’s driving everywhere. You don’t really have the opportunity to talk to people very much when you’re all sitting in your car packed on the street, where if you’re walking or biking together, there’s much more community interaction. So, that makes a big difference.

There’re two safety issues for kids getting to school. One is the traffic safety issue. Parents are afraid of the other parents, who are driving. “I don’t want my kids to walk by that other crazy mom’s house, she drives like a maniac and she’s going to hit my kids.” There’s also the stranger danger fear that some crazy person is going to drive up and snag my kid, they’re going to be kidnapped, and horrible things are going to happen to them because they’re the only kid on the streets. If there were 100 kids walking home from school, there are a lot of eyes on the street, then that criminal stuff doesn’t happen. But, you have to get over that hump of getting enough people out there where it starts to become a deterrent.

I’m sure you’re aware of the San Diego Critical Mass bike rides?#

Yes.

Are you affiliated with that at all?#

We’re not. I really applaud their goals and think it’s an exciting development. In San Diego, it’s grown tremendously. Back just even a few years ago, it was a big thing when you got 50 people out on a Critical Mass ride. Last month, in June, they had 750 riders on Critical Mass. It’s huge.

It’s an interesting dynamic.

The Bike Coalition is about safe and legal riding, so there’s some behaviors on the Critical Mass that we can’t really support. There’s some alcohol use we’d probably like to not see happen. In order to keep a group that big together, a lot of times, you end up corking intersections and jamming up traffic for the other road users, which is great as a statement. I like that whole idea that we’re out there, and we need the space on the road. Imagine if it was like this every day. But, at the same time, the Bike Coalition is really strongly encouraging bicyclists to stop at red lights and stop signs, ride the right way, and lights at night. So, it’s tough for me to go to Critical Mass, but I have gone, I have ridden it, and it’s a great, joyful, wonderful experience. You should do it.

That brings me to a point, and I think you mentioned this on the phone about cops ticketing cyclists. I don’t believe that cyclists should be legally bound to the same rules that cars are. I don’t know if there’s any official thought on this.#

There is. The Vehicle Code says we have to follow all the same rules, we have all the same responsibility as automobile drivers.

I was pulled over on my bike for making a right turn at a red light, where there’s a no right turn on red, which I thought was ludicrous because all I had to do was walk onto the sidewalk, turn 90 degrees, and step back off the sidewalk, and I would have been legit.#

Yeah, but you could have just waited for the green. I think that you’re right. There are a lot of laws that have been created because of the hazards of automobiles that if the only vehicles out there were bicyclists, the laws would be different because you’re not driving a deadly weapon when you’re driving a bike. On the other hand, from the advocacy point of view, I need bicyclists to follow all the laws because there has been a push from the 70’s until today to not encourage bicycling, but to actively discourage bicyclists from being able to use the roads. There’s a strong sentiment in the public’s fear that bicyclists shouldn’t be allowed on the roads at all because they can’t be trusted to follow the rules, and so, they get everybody into
trouble.

Invariably, it’s a little frustrating to me because I’ll go to a meeting, go to SANDAG and talk about we need to put bike lanes on the street, we need to spend a couple million dollars on this bike facility. And every single time, someone will say to me, “Why should we spend any money on bicyclists? They don’t follow any of the rules, they don’t respect the laws that are out there. If they want to be on the road, they need to respect the rules as they are, and work within the system to change them.”

Idaho, for example, has kind of come to terms with the idea that bicyclists and motorists may need to behave differently at stop signs. In Idaho, the law for bicyclists is you can roll through a stop sign if you’re doing it at a speed, where you can yield if appropriate to do so. You’re not required to come to a complete stop at every stop sign, which is kind of what bicyclists often do now because they understand the yielding rules and do it appropriately. But, California doesn’t have that law. California, you’re supposed to stop.
So, it becomes an interesting dilemma for us. We only have so many resources. Do we pursue a stop sign kind of exemption for bicyclists, or do we work on something else? And what are the political costs for us institutionalizing what was, before, illegal behavior and now, suddenly, for bicyclists, it’s legal. It’s a tricky thing. I think most bicyclists who are out there on the road, who are blowing through the stop signs don’t ever get feedback from people that what they’re doing is an issue. What happens is the motorists who get pissed off don’t find the original bicyclist who did it. They either pick up the phone and call me and tell me how responsible we are, or they take it out on the next bicyclist that they see. So, that is not good for the bicycling community, overall. But, I can understand the impulse. A lot of times, it doesn’t make sense to sit there, and OK, there’s no one for miles.

I’m concerned if I stop at an intersection with a bunch of cars, I might become invisible to them, whereas if I’m set apart, if I just go ahead and break the law, when that pack of cars comes up on me again, I’m going to be clearly out in front them and I’ve basically distanced myself from the cars for a while. When the light turns green and everybody just goes, I’m there with a bunch of people who are flooring it. It just seems to be a more dangerous setting for me to be lined up with all those cars.#

It depends on where you are in an intersection. One of the things we work really hard on in our Road 1 class, is dealing with just those kind of situations, where should you be at an intersection where you’re going to be most visible, most predictable, where you and motorists are going to understand what each other are trying to do. We really encourage folks, if you’re sitting at that intersection, not to be too far to the right, for example. You’re going straight, but the motorist coming up behind you is turning right, so you get right hooked. You are kind of out of what we call the cone of vision for those drivers. If you’re out front and center in the middle of that lane because you’re going straight through the intersection, they’re going to see you. People who are driving see what’s in front of them. They don’t see what’s off to the side very often. When you’re in front, more often than not, they’re going to see you and understand what’s going on.

It depends so much on the geometry of the route. For example, if you’ve got a bike lane up ahead, there’s room for them to get past you if you squeeze up to the front and jump ahead in line. You get across that intersection, you’ve got a little gap. There’s room for them to pass you. I really wouldn’t encourage you to do it in a spot like on Pennsylvania, for example, up in Hillcrest. The road’s very narrow, there’s parking on both sides. You’re going to get in front of those cars, and then, they’re trapped behind you. And now, they’re really irritated that you jumped ahead, and now, you’re delaying everybody. It’s really a dance, I think, for bicyclists to be interacting with motorists, and it’s not something that’s necessarily easy or intuitive for people.

That’s why we teach the class because there’s nothing like, A, knowing what the rules are, and B, going out and doing it under the guidance of an instructor, who knows what the rules are and how to do it and can demonstrate it for you, and you can do it in kind of a little more controlled environment. It makes a huge difference for people, but it takes time. Our Road 1 class is nine hours, all together, half in the classroom, half on the bike. And so, we go out and we do it. One of our best instructors, Jim Bross [SP] teaches out of Normal Heights. His Road 1 class is out there on Adams Avenue. They’re on El Cajon Boulevard. They’re making left turns, merging over, using left turn pockets and turning left on El Cajon Boulevard, which, for most cyclists, is something they would be really thinking hard about doing. How would I do that? Do I want to do that? Why should I do that?

But then, when you go and you’re trained and you do it, you realize, hey, this works. I can be a part of traffic, not hold people up too much. And people understand what I’m trying to do, how I’m doing it, and they’re not going to hit me. It works really well, but again, it’s not something that is necessarily easy. And it’s one thing for me to say, “Oh, yeah, just use the left turn pocket, go over there and turn left on the left turn pocket.” It’s way different for me to say that than for you to go do it.

Everything you’re saying actually does make sense to me, but I still don’t like waiting at red lights.#

Well, nobody does!

Nobody does. That sort of behavior just isn’t intuitive to people, especially when they’re starting out. They’re intimidated, and their instinct might be to get over to the side and get out of the way, when it’s not the safest thing to do.#

For a lot of people, it is. It’s unfortunate that we haven’t done a better job, training people to ride because the instinctive thing for them to do sets them up for so many more crashes because everybody’s afraid of what’s happening behind them. People behind you will see you if you’re out there. What they won’t see is if you’re coming up to intersections and you’re too far to the right, you’re kind of hidden by other traffic and you end up kind of popping out into the intersection, where people are not prepared for you or know what you’re going to do, driveways, in particular.

Only 18 percent of bicyclist injuries are car/bike crashes. 45 percent of bicyclist injuries are bicyclist single vehicle crashes, where the bicyclist falls down. And a lot of that is seams on the side of the road, sand, debris that will either cause you to flat or cause you to fall down. And those are the places where people get hurt, but they don’t think about that when they’re out riding in the gutter. They’re thinking those cars behind me aren’t going to hit me. Well, yeah, but the car that’s coming out of the driveway is, and you’re going to catch your tire on that seam between the gutter and the road, or where they’ve done the trenching along the side of the street, and there’s that little dip for 100 yards. That’s going to catch you and make you fall down and you’re going to get hurt.

It’s fun, the more we can kind of give people hints about how to be safer out there and how to make it more enjoyable. I think a lot of those same people who are hovering over to the right are scared the whole time they’re out there.

Yeah, it’s sort of stressful.#

It is, and if you can get some skills and understand what’s going on, it becomes a much less stressful experience to be on the bike in traffic, at least from my own experience. I started out at the Bike Coalition knowing nothing about riding. I mean, I knew how to pedal and steer. And for most people, that’s the extent of their bicycling knowledge. But when I learned what to do, it opened up a whole world of riding for me because now, I can ride everywhere. I don’t always like it. I mean, there are still some places that are scary or intimidating, not the friendliest places. But, I know how to get through them in the safest way, and so, I’m much less intimidated about I wanted to go on that ride, but I have to go through that freeway interchange. OK, now I know how to do that and I’m not going to let that stop me. It’s not my favorite part of the ride.

You might even avoid it.#

I definitely would avoid it. I don’t like high-speed interchanges. I’m not a big fan, personally, of bike lanes on the big arterials. Riding there still, even though I know I’m safe and I’m not going to get hit, it’s just noisy, polluted and unpleasant. It’s not my favorite kind of riding. But, if I need to get from point A to point B, I’ll be able to do that and I’m not going to be freaked out by having to go on that big arterial, anymore.

Bike The Bay, it’s our big fundraiser. We’re so excited about it. 20 years ago, maybe more, there was a ride, called the Five Cities Ride, which was done by the American Youth Hostel Association here in town. They had access to the bridge and they did it for a few years. Cal Tran said, “We don’t want you on the bridge, anymore.” And so, it kind of died. It’s been hanging there for so long, we want to ride on the bridge, we never get to ride on the bridge. And so, we’re really excited about being able to do that. We’re hoping that a lot of people will show up. They’re letting us have 2,500 riders, and that’s it. So, we’re encouraging people to sign up and get registered because you don’t want to get left out. We’re excited about it.

There’s great stuff happening in Oceanside. Probably a different conversation from today, but Oceanside has decided they want to be one of the leading bicycle friend communities. And so, they’re doing some infrastructure improvements, they’re starting education programs, they’ve got the city council on board. They’re talking about trying to get Tour of California to come down and have Oceanside be one of the start and end points for that. There’s a lot of exciting stuff out there.

The League of American Bicyclists has a program, called The Bicycle-Friendly Communities Program. And what it does is it looks at a community and says what has this community done to support and encourage bicycling? So, it’s everything from what facilities are available, how many miles of bike lane, how many miles of bike path? What kind of educational programs are in place, are they teaching kids to ride, are there opportunities for adults to learn? Are they working with the enforcement community? Are people getting ticketed for the right things and not being harassed for things they shouldn’t be harassed for? Are they doing encouragement programs like Bike To Work Day or fun rides, or getting people out on bikes? So, they kind of combine all of that stuff together and then, award communities that are doing a great job. So, places like Portland, Davis, Seattle, Denver and Chicago.

And what about San Diego?#

San Diego is not on the list.

Nooo! I read something about how we have the most bike trails. href="#q21">#

We’ve got about 1,000 miles of bike facility in San Diego County. Most of that are bike lanes. There is, I think, 75, maybe 80 miles of bike path in San Diego, mostly in little chunks. We’d like to knit those all together. But, what I think San Diego is still lacking is the education piece of it, the enforcement piece. We do some encouragement. Bike To Work Day is a big deal in San Diego every year in the bicycling community. We have some great fun rides that happen in San Diego. But, we haven’t reached the level of commitment that some of these other communities have, and we’re still working on that. And the City of San Diego, itself, has been kind of distracted. They’ve had some financial issues. But, I think things are calming down at the city, and there’s going to be some opportunities for some real improvement, I hope. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time.

How long have you been doing this job?#

Since 2000.

And how did you get into this?#

I totally fell into it. My dad’s a big bike rider, and I moved to San Diego with my husband and two kids. We moved here from the suburbs of Chicago. He sent me a bike, and he said, “You no longer have any excuse not to ride. It’s San Diego, it’s sunny 360 days of the year. Your kids are a little older. No excuse, get out there and ride.” He rides the Death Ride every year. He’s really a strong rider. So, I said, “OK, I’ll ride.” I mean, I always liked bike riding, but it wasn’t a big focus in my life.

But, I didn’t have any place to ride, and I didn’t know what to do. There used to be a publication in town called Bicycling In San Diego. There was a club ride calendar and a bunch of different stuff. And it had want ads in the back. There was a little want ad for the Bike Coalition. They were hiring an executive director. So, I submitted my resume. And they said, “Wow, we really like you, but we already found somebody.” And I said, “That’s fine, I wasn’t really looking for something big right now, but I’d still like to volunteer.” And at the end of the meeting, the fellow that they had hired came up to me and said, “Are you serious about wanting the job because if I take it, my wife will kill me?” So, I said, “Well, yeah, OK, I’d like to do it.”

And I have to say that the board of the Bicycle Coalition has been terrific. This is the best job I’ve ever had. It doesn’t pay much, but I started when my youngest daughter was in kindergarten. So, I was working 10, 15 hours a week answering the phone, writing a newsletter, officey kind of stuff. And they let me work from home, really flexible hours. But, the one thing that they did say before they kind of turned me loose as executive director, “You don’t know anything about bicycling. You know how to ride, but you don’t know how to ride in traffic, you don’t know anything about bicycle advocacy, so you don’t get to say anything.” I didn’t get to say anything for about the first year until they kind of got me up to speed on the ins and outs of bicycle advocacy.

Often I say to people I work for a bike advocacy organization. They say, “Oh, you do bike paths.” And it’s so much more than that. It’s so much more than building facilities. It’s about creating a culture that allows and welcomes people bicycling. Way bigger than building a bike path. I’ve been really lucky.