We Do Three Things

Every dollar you pay to ride goes into safer streets, and it shows up in one of three ways. One project for each.

Action

Work that gets done on the ground

01 · Skyline Boulevard

Advocate

Pressure on the people who own the road

02 · Hesperian Boulevard at Lewelling

Fund

Money pointed at a named stretch of road

03 · The Bay Trail

01 · Work that gets done on the ground

Action

Skyline Boulevard

Skyline is one of the best rides in the Bay, and the shoulder along one stretch of it had been disappearing for years, buried under pine duff in some places and swallowed by ivy in others, until there was nowhere left to ride but the traffic lane on blind curves.

On August 16 a crew of us spent the day out there with rakes and loppers and took it back by hand. Every photo below is from that day.

The Skyline shoulder mid-clearing, swept clean on one side and still buried under pine duff on the other — Swept down to pavement on the left, still buried on the right.

A volunteer in a high visibility vest raking pine duff off the Skyline shoulder into a pile — Everything in that pile was sitting on the shoulder that morning.

Ivy grown thickly over the Skyline shoulder, covering it up to the white line — Further along, the ivy has come all the way to the white line.

A volunteer leaning over the guardrail on Skyline to cut back vegetation growing onto the shoulder — Cutting it back behind the guardrail, where it starts.

02 · Pressure on the people who own the road

Advocate

Hesperian Boulevard at Lewelling

Hesperian is a road that a lot of people genuinely need on a bike, and almost none of it was built with that in mind. The section at Lewelling is the worst of it.

It runs through more than one jurisdiction, so there is no single door to knock on. We spend our time in the meetings, with the riders who use the road, making sure bikes get written into the plans before the paving crews show up. Once a road is repaved, the shape of it is settled for another twenty years.

We also put real money behind the case itself. We pay for awareness campaigns on this corridor, hiring content creators and working with people who have actual ties into local politics, and we fund the documentation of the specific spots where it goes wrong so the danger is a matter of record rather than a difference of opinion. A road like Hesperian tends to move when enough of the right people are talking about it, and getting them talking is something you can budget for.

03 · Money pointed at a named stretch of road

Fund

The Bay Trail

The Bay Trail is the closest thing we have to a ring around the water, and the gaps in it are exactly where riders get pushed back out onto fast roads.

Closing a gap is genuinely expensive, and it is also the most direct way to buy miles of protected riding, so the biggest checks we write end up here. Every August about a thousand riders use these segments, which is the best argument for finishing them that we know how to make.

The Fourth Project Is Yours

We deliberately have not spent everything we have raised. There is a reserve sitting there, in the tens of thousands, waiting for the next road. You already know which intersection scares you and which shoulder disappears, so tell us about it and we will go look at it.

Pitch Us a Project

Ride With Us

The Bay Ride is put on by LiveTheBay.org, a volunteer-run 501(c)(3) non-profit. Your entry is what pays for all of the above.