Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commissions/Committee (BPAC) are bodies of citizen volunteers who advise staff and/or their city council on biking and walking issues. Strong, informed, savvy BPACs can help cities craft better decisions which should lead to more and safer bicycling and walking. SVBC conducted a survey to assess the effectiveness of current BPACs with an intent to find out how they can be made more effective. The survey was sent to over 200 people including city staff, council members, and BPAC members of all cities in Santa Clara County, 59 responses were received. Sixty-eight percent of the total respondents were BPAC/BPAG members, 23% city staff, and 10% were council members. This blog gives a brief analysis of the survey results.Every city BPAC is different. The size, scale, resources available, issues discussed, everything is different. Some cities have very active BPACs, while others may not even consider it important to have a BPAC. Also, it was very interesting to find contrasting opinions from different people of the same city about their own BPACs. Some quick statistics and figures from the survey are as follows -

68% respondents find BPAC meetings to be useful.
53% respondents said the average attendance of members of the public at BPAC meetings was between 0-4, while 24% said it was between 5-8.
82% responded their BPACs engage well with city staff, 30% responded their BPACs engage well with their councils, 52% responded their BPACs engage well with members of the public.
The following graph represents effectiveness of BPACs in different aspects. It can be found that BPACs are at an average of 50% effective in most cases, which means there is another halfway to go to make them 100% effective!

The top priority things, participants want their BPACs to focus on are -

Recommend policies to city council to promote biking and walking
1. Review and comment on biking and walking related projects

The common concerns that came across throughout the survey was lack of support and relationships with city council, time and involvement of staff, and community support and outreach efforts. This clearly indicates that our current BPACs could improve engagement with stakeholders. The overall underlying issue across the survey was that most BPAC members feel the lack of effectiveness and hence the inability to bring about desired outcomes. A BPAC is formed of citizen volunteers that are typically advisory to City Council or staff members. It is up to the BPAC to be strong bike/ped advocates, which the city has to listen to, as residents!With learnings from this survey, SVBC is currently creating a BPAC Capacity Building Program to make BPACs more effective. It will be a three year program. In the first year, we are recruiting BPAC members from the cities of San José, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and VTA BPAC. The training would be exclusively for these amazing bike/ped advocates, who work hard toward improving their city infrastructure and policies. The program will be structured around quarterly trainings sessions, using various speakers, peer-to-peer discussions, infrastructure rides, and more. SVBC will soon be rolling out details for the first Capacity Building Program this fall with more opportunities for other BPAC members to follow in years to come.