A Year in Review: Advocacy Advance

This post originally appeared on the Alliance for Biking & Walking’s blog and is written by Mary Lauran Hall.

If you need a healthy helping of bicycle and pedestrian policy insight to get through the holiday season, you’ve come to the right place.

Advocacy Advance, our partnership with the League of American Bicyclists, released a series of reports and webinars this year to help advocates and public officials in the U.S. maximize investment in bicycling and walking.

Missed a few sessions or reports? We’ve got you covered. Here’s the full list of reports and sessions from 2014. 

• Winning Bicycling and Walking Projects in TIGER 6 Applications (March 2014)
  To prepare advocates and agency staff for the application process, Advocacy Advance held a webinar about the new round of TIGER 6 grants. The session included tips from successful past applicants.
• Going Multimodal at the Ballot Box (April 2014)
  As the federal funding landscape changes, more states, regions and cities are looking for local sources of critical transportation dollars. As a result, there has been a recent surge of transportation ballot measures across the United States. Advocacy Advance partnered with the Center for Transportation Excellence (CFTE) and the National Alliance of Public Transportation Advocates on this webinar designed to provide advocates with the necessary tools to take a transportation ballot measure from an idea to a winning measure. 
• Getting it Done: How Communities are Paying for Innovative Infrastructure (July 2014)
  How are communities across the country paying for separated bicycle infrastructure? Just like how communities are paying for other important civic infrastructure, communities are using a combination of federal, state, local/regional, and private sources of funds.
• First Mile, Last Mile: A Look into Biking and Walking in Federal Transit Administration Programs(August 2014) 
  This report looks at how biking and walking can be integrated with transit, and which FTA programs can support projects and programs to increase accessibility among people who bike, walk, and take transit. REPORT & WEBINAR
• Public-Private Partnerships for Transportation (September 2014) 
  This concise primer answers basic questions about public-private partnerships (PPP, or P3) and how bicycling and walking can fit into these projects. 
• MAP-21: Looking Back & Looking Ahead (October 2014) 
  The current federal transportation bill, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) was a two-year bill that started on October 1, 2012. Two years later, MAP-21 was set to expire on October 1, 2014 but has received a slight extension through May 31, 2015. On this Advocacy Advance webinar, we looked back on MAP-21 and forecast what’s next for federal transportation funding for bicycling and walking.
• Leveraging Health Funding for Active Transportation Investments (November 2014)
  How can transportation and health stakeholders work together well? This report reviews the recent round of CDC awards in the area of prevention and provides examples of effective health-transportation partnerships. 
• How Communities Are Paying to Maintain Trails, Bike Lanes, and Sidewalks (December 2014)
  This report addresses both the technical and political challenges to maintaining sidewalks, trails, and protected bikeways. It examines agency maintenance policies and procedures for bike/ped maintenance, and it provides several examples of communities who’ve successfully made these facilities a sufficient priority to overcome the challenge of paying for maintenance.