Winning improvements to transit, walking, and biking at the local level is thrilling. The hours of effort that it takes to increase frequency on an important bus route, get sidewalks built on a street that had none, or turn a painted bike lane into a protected one deserve celebration. And when the party is over, you can start laying the groundwork for the next one by telling your elected officials in Congress about what you just achieved locally.
Reality Check
Members of the road lobby meet with Congress on a weekly basis to fight for road widening and highway construction. If they’re not hearing from you, they won’t know about the need and appetite for public transit and safe streets.
Most members of Congress and their staff — in both the House and the Senate — do not think about transportation that much.
This blind spot is a huge opportunity for organizing. These elected officials and their staff pass a budget of trillions of dollars every year, which includes tens of billions of dollars in discretionary grants, where a letter from their office to grantmakers factors significantly into the decision-making process.
In addition, some congresses get a chance to change not only how much money is spent, but what types of transportation we spend that money on. Simply sharing the work that your organization already does with the members of Congress that represent you, can make them significantly more likely to support that work that you do with the billions of dollars that they impact each and every year.
3 Easy Ways to Leverage Local Work for Federal Impact
- Every time you publish a report, survey, or fact sheet, send a copy to your congressional reps in addition to local officials.
- If you collect rider testimonies or stories, send copies to congressional offices so they can witness and understand their constituents’ needs.
- If you’re planning an event or ride-along during one of the in-district recesses, invite your representatives to join.
Why should you communicate with congressional offices?
Leveraging up your local work impacts how your Congressperson understands what people want in their district. Many elected officials don’t have anyone on their staff with experience in transportation policy. If you establish a relationship with them, you can become a trusted source of information.
This is especially important because the transit-agnostic (if not outright anti-transit) road-building industry meets with elected officials once a week. If you leave a vacuum for your federal elected officials, it will be filled by the road lobby.
Communicating with congressional offices can also yield tangible benefits. Last year’s federal budget was over seven trillion dollars, with about $140 billion spent on transportation (roads, airlines, public transit, etc), including tens of billions distributed to public transit, primarily through formula and secondarily through discretionary grants. Applications from state and local governments are significantly more likely to succeed if their federal elected officials submit letters of support for the projects to the USDOT. In the short term, an active relationship with your member of Congress can increase their likelihood to not only submit these letters, but also influence the administrative officials who make these decisions.
What’s at stake in the long term is:
- How much money is allocated to transit in reauthorization. Our push is to expand funding for public transit and see that the funding is on par with highway spending.
- How transportation funds can be spent on public transit. We want to see an expansion of funding for operations and to ensure that highway funding can be flexed to fund public transit.
- We can organize within Congress to reallocate more of the $140 billion annual transportation budget to public transit. For Congress to prioritize transit, biking and walking, they need to hear from you about how important transit is.
Which member(s) of Congress should you reach out to?
Transit would improve people’s lives in every state and congressional district around the country, so you should be willing to reach out to every federal elected official in your area.
How do you get in touch with a congressional office?
The link to the email addresses of the staff in each congressional office who work on transportation is here.
You may want to think of this as building a relationship. Start by sharing local work, sending in press releases, stories of your members, and reports or factsheets that you develop. If the transit staff in DC doesn’t respond, call or drop in to talk to a staff person in your district.
If you still don’t have any luck, identify people you know who currently have a relationship with the Congressperson; they may be part of a grassroots group, union local, or business organization. Asking them to reach out to a member of Congress, whether it’s just to hear why they opposed a bill or to introduce you and your organization to the Congressperson. If you’re not sure where to start, we are happy to discuss.
How often should you communicate with your representatives and senators?
You don’t have to be reaching the road-lobby’s cadence of weekly meetings with key elected officials, but you want to be making meaningful contact with them often enough that they know to expect an email, if not actively seek an opinion, from you on a frequent basis.
What should you share with your congressional offices?
Your member of Congress would benefit from hearing about anything transportation-related that happens in their district. This could include:
- Recent events in the news, such as an increase (or decrease) in local bus service.
- Constituent stories.
- Reports, fact sheets, or other work products that you and your organization have developed.
- Invitations to events in their district, including public events organized by your organization.
Whenever you reach out to your congressional office, you should include three components:
- The problem: ie, the situation you want to educate them about
- What your proposal is and how it relates to federal issues (like federal funds for operations would support the needed bus routes, free fares etc or it is taking years to move from planning to purchase a new bus and acquiring one – Congress should streamline this process.
- Your organization’s ask.