The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is one of the city’s most venerated and potent nonprofits. For decades, the SFBC has pushed, pulled, and prodded the city to make bike-riding safer, especially in recent years — with a victory most recently near the South of Market Caltrain station.
At the same time, the coalition now finds itself the target of anger from some of its own members and directors for taking donations from so-called tech mobility companies, which some of its members love to hate, and which even the group’s executive director, Brian Wiedenmeier, has called to the carpet in recent op-eds.
Like all organizations, SFBC has its share of internal debates and fissures. But its disputes of late are microcosmic examples of the political and social forces changing and rearranging San Francisco as a whole.
Moving around town is a major piece of the disorienting puzzle. Public transit is slow to improve and frustrating to ride, the populace is hungry for alternatives, and the (often tech-driven) alternatives are eager to fill the void — even if they roll like early Zuckerberg, moving fast and breaking things.
The old and the new
Welcome to San Francisco in 2018. Here’s a snapshot to put in our civic time capsule: Established and emerging forms of transportation are all competing for limited street space. And a vehemently anti-automobile group is taking cash from driverless car makers.
The current dispute bubbled up at the coalition’s board meeting two weeks ago after members learned that Cruise Automation and Waymo, the driverless vehicle divisions of General Motors and Alphabet (a.k.a. Google’s parent company), each forked over $5,000 to sponsor the annual Golden Wheel Awards gala, which was taking place two days later.
The platinum sponsorships seemed to go against the coalition’s prevailing ethos. Executive director Wiedenmeier’s SF Examiner op-ed in March criticized the “rush to market” by the driverless car makers, which if not properly designed and regulated, would risk safety and “further divid[e] people along the lines of wealth and privilege.”
The $10,000 from Waymo and Cruise might also have violated SFBC policy. Here’s the language: “The Executive Director shall not … accept donations from business enterprises whose primary income is derived from the manufacture and/or sale of private automobiles, or whose primary product are private automobiles and/or trucks.” Here’s the entire section:
A proposal to return the Cruise and Waymo money was shot down by the board of directors. “We had a chance to do the right thing and we failed,” says Adam Keats, an environmental lawyer at the Center for Food Safety and a member of SFBC’s all-volunteer board since 2016.
Keats also penned a proposal to expand the policy to “prohibit donations from TNCs” — that is, ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft — “autonomous vehicle companies, and their subsidiaries.”
That proposal was sent to a committee for further discussion. Keats admits that only two or three other board members supported the proposals. (He spoke to The Frisc on his own behalf, not on behalf of the coalition or the board.)
The discussion was not particularly contentious, according to one observer — a bike coalition member of 7 years (not a director) who occasionally attends the board meetings. It seemed, however, that some of the directors were not aware of the donations until Keats brought up the issue, says the observer, who spoke to The Frisc on condition of anonymity.
The Frisc reached out to several of the 15 board members. None would speak on the record. At least one who responded was hopeful that the policy language could be changed to clarify that subsidiaries of car companies should be included in the ban.
Keats remains hopeful, too: “We’ll see if we can figure it out in the next few weeks or months.”
Wiedenmeier acknowledges that the current policy lacks clarity around parent companies and their subsidiaries. But he makes no apologies for the sponsorships, which he called “gifts.”
There’s a bigger reason for taking the money, he says — and that reason opens a window onto what’s really behind this dispute: a struggle for the direction of the coalition, as rapid change roils San Francisco.
A democracy fight
In 2015, the SFBC board tried to change its own election process. Instead of the 10,000-plus rank-and-file members voting for candidates, the board wanted to appoint its own members — a more streamlined, less messy, and less democratic process.
The membership beat back the change after a splinter group, Save SF Bike, threatened legal action. The subsequent election, which ended in early 2016, saw directors from differing slates elected.
The new beef over tech-mobility donations is “a continuation of that behavior” to neuter the say of membership, says Kash, the owner of Warm Planet Bikes on Market Street, whose involvement in the coalition goes back to Gulf War protests on wheels in the early 1990s. (Kash prefers to go by his single name.)
The election tug of war in late 2015 was not just about voting power, but also about diversity and broader political engagement. “It’s the unfortunate heritage of bike advocacy,” board candidate Andy Thornley told Streetsblog at the time. “Any monkey can organize white, well-educated males who have the time to go to meetings. The question is, how do you get beyond just being an organization that already has the support of the easy-to-organize groups, and reach out to people who have other, more important issues on their list?”
(Thornley was elected and remains a board member. He did not respond to a request for comment.)
A ‘radical organization’
Wiedenmeier isn’t comfortable with us-versus-them rhetoric regarding the tech companies. “Many of our members work for those companies,” he says, and he isn’t interested in alienating them. “We want to grow membership and be open to many points of view.”
Still, sentiment has continued to build in some parts of the city that bicycles are a threat to the status quo — either as a spearhead for gentrification or as an offensive intrusion into a very gentrified neighborhood.
“This was conceived as a radical organization. It’s nice that biking has become mainstream, but we’re still fighting for road space,” says Kash. In other words, even if driverless cars make the roads safer, they are competitors for asphalt that could be dedicated to bikes.
About 3% percent of journeys in San Francisco are on a bicycle, according to San Francisco State University professor Jason Henderson and author of Street Fight, an examination of the city’s mobility politics. (An SFMTA survey in fall 2017 put the number lower, to 2%. See below.) It should be around 10%, says Henderson; he argues that Uber and Lyft, which have gone from zero to 4% of total rides in SF in recent years, have stymied bicycle growth.
Taking the $5,000 each from Waymo and Cruise (as well as Uber’s e-bicycle subsidiary Jump, which also bought a $5,000 Golden Wheels sponsorship, and Ford GoBike, recently bought by Lyft, which gave $2,500), is necessary to “engage” with the companies, according to Wiedenmeier: “Ignoring them won’t make them go away. Corporate sponsorships are part of a spectrum of engagement, and they won’t change our advocacy at all.”
The sponsors came to the awards, he says, and heard first-hand about the danger cyclists face on the streets every day. Wiedenmeier’s speech that night addressed them directly. He called for safety improvements to Uber and Lyft; insisted that broader environmental and social issues should be paramount for all tech mobility companies — and above all reminded the audience that the world needs fewer cars. “The ultimate sustainability goal for all modes should be fewer automobile trips,” he declared.
One board member, who spoke to The Frisc anonymously and is allied with Wiedenmeier, agrees that having the companies close at hand means it’s easier to tell them hard truths.
Eight of the 15 board seats will be up for grabs in January. ‘I expect our members to hold their elected board members accountable.’ —Adam Keats
But this is not just about better opportunities to take the Waymos, Ubers, and other tech mobility folks to task while sharing hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. Wiedenmeier thinks driverless cars, in particular, could herald a much safer era for San Francisco streets, “potentially taking human error out of the equation.”
Critics are skeptical. “If we’re financially dependent on companies on the other side of an issue, it’s difficult to make as strong and spirited an argument as we should to represent our members,” says Kash.
The donations in question, even if the Uber and Lyft e-bike cash is included, are almost certainly a small fraction of the coalition’s revenues for 2017, which haven’t been released yet. In 2016, the most recent report available, SFBC counted more than $2 million in revenue. About $350,000, or 17%, came from membership dues. That percentage has slipped a bit in recent years, down from 22% in 2012, as the coalition has grown its revenue base with corporate, foundation, and government funds.
(Measured another way: Membership dues and individual contributions combined to make up 36% of revenue in 2016, down from 41% in 2012.)
Short of polling a sample of the 10,000-plus SFBC members, the next board election will be the best measure of the disgruntlement about the donations. If the problem isn’t resolved by next January, when eight of the 15 board seats will be up, “I expect our members to hold their elected board members accountable,” Keats says.
Wiedenmeier declines to say whether the donations will be a flash point. “I have no idea what the issues will be for that election,” he says. “But I hope many members — particularly women and people of color — are interested and decide to run.”
Alex Lash is the editor in chief of The Frisc.