EVERY ADVOCACY WIN REQUIRES MORE ADVOCACY! *All photos by Brian Palmer T hank you to everyone who attended lobby day as part of the National Bike Summit. I heard from a number of you about successful meetings. I also spoke with a number of staffers who shared that they appreciated hearing from the bicycling community about what we see as critical needs around any potential infrastructure package. For the lobby day we asked for three things: * Increased funding for the TIGER program * Co-Sponsors for HR 4241: The Transportation Access and System Connectivity Act * Support for an infrastructure package which promotes: safety, local control, building and fixing gaps in networks and building resilient and multimodal infrastructure Success! In the final budget passed on March 23, Congress SUMMER 2018 tripled funding for the TIGER program. Over the last seven years, bicycling and walking has done well under TIGER. Trail projects have averaged roughly 4.5 percent of TIGER funding compared with the 2 percent of regular transportation funding. Additionally, complete streets projects have done extremely well. The 2017 funding included 16 percent for complete streets and 5 percent for bicycling and walking trails. US DOT REVISES AND RENAMES TIGER PROGRAM However, when the U.S. Department of Transportation released the notice of funding for the program there were several changes to the program. First, they changed the name from TIGER to BUILD (Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage BICYCLE FRIENDLY AMERICA 21http://www.bikeleague.org/content/tiger-grants-announced-good-news-complete-streets-and-trails http://www.bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/NBS18_FactSheet_TIGER.pdf http://www.bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/NBS18_FactSheet_HR4241.pdf http://www.bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/NBS18_FactSheet_HR4241.pdf http://www.bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/NBS18_FactSheet_Infrastructure.pdf