Our Story

From 1985 to 1992, Wilderness Trail Bikes (WTB) advocacy focused on bicycle access to trails in Marin County’s parklands and open space. At the time, there were efforts to ban bicycles from using Marin’s extensive trail system, and WTB fought for more inclusive policy that recognized the rights and responsibilities of trail users on both foot and bicycle. Also during this period, WTB President Patrick Seidler formed the King Mountain Open Space Association with the goal of stewarding King Mountain in Larkspur from private ownership to public open space. 

In 1993, WTB-TAM President Patrick Seidler published the two-part “TRAILGATE - A New Paradigm” with two articles in the The Coastal Post. These articles, “Intra-County Transportation” and “Bicycle Freeways,” were the catalyst that launched WTB into decades of advocacy on behalf of transportation alternatives. Seidler traces the evolution of Marin’s 18th century railroad lines, showing how the rail lines followed the most efficient path between towns. Seidler laid out a vision where modern-day “bicycle freeways” or bike paths serving intra-county commuters followed the routes of the old railroads, leading to a new paradigm for intra-country transportation.

In 1994, the Marin County Department of Parks, Open Space and Cultural Services published the Marin County North - South Bikeway Feasibility Study (part 1 | part 2). This was the first Marin County government-approved document to formally and in detail lay out the alignment for what would later become known as the “North - South Greenway.” Seidler, fresh on the heels of the Coastal Post articles, was invited to join the Ad Hoc Committee on Bicycling. Together, the group put forward the conceptual engineering for a county-spanning bike path from Sausalito to Novato that more-or-less followed the vision in the Coastal Post articles by following the historic Northwestern Pacific Railroad right-of-way. Over the intervening decades, many segments of this system have been built, but gaps still remain. To this day, completing the North - South Greenway is still WTB-TAM’s top goal.

In 1996, Marin County voters were asked to decide on Measure A. This self-imposed sales tax would be used to fund improvements in Marin County Parks and Open Space, but would do nothing to improve access to trails by bicyclists. In response, prominent bicycle advocates, racers and industry members co-signed The Declaration of Inter-Dependence was signed by prominent bicycle advocates, racers and industry members, and published in the Marin Independent Journal to declare opposition to taxation without representation, and to detail the offenses suffered at the hands of entrenched opposition.

In 1997, WTB-TAM formally became a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, known by its name at the time TAM, or “Transportation Alternatives for Marin.” In its first two years, numerous “Bicycle Breakfasts” were held to educate elected officials about existing bicycle and pedestrian plans, initiatives and opportunities. Also this year, WTB opened its first European office in Maastricht, Netherlands. From this ideally-located European home base, WTB-TAM would learn from the Dutch masters of international best practices in bicycle path design.

Following the failure of Measure A, the Marin Sonoma Vision Workshop brought elected officials, engineers, and transportation advocates together to diagnose regional transportation problems. At the same time, WTB-TAM organized the Coalition for Balanced Transportation, a coalition of environmental activists, business owners, and bicycle advocates who organized grassroots support and successfully lobbied to get the North - South Greenway included in 1998’s Measures A and B, which were the outcome of the Marin Sonoma Vision Workshop. In total, Measures A and B would have allocated $300 million for transportation, including $10 to $15 for bicycle transportation. This was the first time the North - South Greenway was included in any formal planning and would-be funding process. This was the beginning of WTB-TAM’s relationship with members of the Marin County Board of Supervisors. Although Measures A and B failed to win voter approval in 1998, the experience taught WTB-TAM valuable lessons that would later be utilized in the passage of other legislation to fund bicycle transportation.

In 1998, WTB-TAM uses its European office location in Maastricht, Netherlands to launch the first of what would be many International Study Trips. This first trip brought Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey, SMART Engineer Ken Eichstaedt, and County Engineer John Kress, amongst others, to the Netherlands to see with their own eyes and experience with their own feet the best bicycle infrastructure in the world. Graduates of the subsequent 12 International Study Trip that WTB-TAM spearheaded have gone on to serve as Public Works Directors, Mayors, and State Legislators. 

Beginning in 1999 and lasting more than a decade, WTB-TAM conducted extensive grassroots work to ensure that construction of the segment of the North - South Greenway between Mission Avenue in Downtown San Rafael and Puerto Suello Hill was included in the Caltrans Highway 101 HOV Gap Closure Project. One of WTB-TAM’s crowning achievements in this project was the conceptual engineering of the grade-separation of the North - South Greenway through the Lincoln Avenue interchange. The project designers said it could not be done, but Seidler demonstrated how it was possible to thread the Greenway through a tunnel underneath the freeway ramps, and to the top of Puerto Suello Hill in a trench between Lincoln Avenue and Highway 101. Today, the grade-separated pathway at Lincoln Avenue interchange serves as a model that projects designers are looking to apply at other interchanges along Highway 101 in Marin. The project cost $10 million and was completed in 2010.

In 2001, WTB-TAM organized a “Congressional Bicycle Breakfast” with Congressman Oberstar as the keynote speaker. Oberstar delivered a thunderous speech, ending with the proclamation that “If I were King, I would make Marin County the capital of the bicycle!” Shortly thereafter, Representative Oberstar introduced the Pedestrian and Cyclist Equity Act of 2003 (PACE), which would fund Safe Routes to School, create more bikeable and walkable communities, and fund pilot communities for non-motorized transportation, modeled after programs in the Netherlands. PACE would ultimately incorporated into the Transportation Re-Authorization Bill of 2005.

In 2002, WTB-TAM joined the SMART Pathway Bicycle Pedestrian Planning Advisory Group. The following year, The Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit District (a.k.a. “SMART”) was incorporated. WTB-TAM came up with the idea of building the SMART Pathway (a.k.a. the North - South Greenway) in SMART’s right-of-way, parallel to the train tracks. Working in cooperation with SMART’s engineering team, Patrick Seidler came up with the engineering methodology that allowed SMART to demonstrate how the pathway could fit within, alongside, or nearby the railroad right-of-way for the entire 71 miles between Larkspur and Cloverdale. 

On August 10, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Federal Transportation Re-Authorization Act into law. Known officially as the “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users” or SAFETEA-LU for short, this is the legislation that formally established the National Safe Routes to School Program. It also established the Non-motorized Transportation Pilot Program, in which four communities were selected to participate: Columbia MO, Minneapolis-St. Paul MN, Sheboygan County WI, and Marin County CA. WTB-TAM played a crucial role for paving the way for SAFETEA-LU, and in fact wrote much of the language of the bill itself, which it shared with the bill’s author, Congressman James Oberstar (D-MN). In total, SAFETEA-LU funded $4.5 billion for bicycle and pedestrian transportation in the United States.

Another champion of bicycle transportation in Washington was Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who in 2010 introduced the Active Communities Transportation Act, or “ACT” for short. The ACT Act proposed to allocate $2 billion to expand the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program from the original 4 communities to 40 communities, with $50 million for each of 40 communities. The original 4 communities would have been included in the 40, which means Marin would have gained an additional $50 million for bicycle transportation. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama did not sign the bill into law. Obama later recounted in his memoirs that his failure to sign this bill, and infrastructure bills in general, was one of the greatest regrets of his presidency. 

As a result of Marin’s inclusion in the 2005 Federal Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program, almost every city in Marin County got an updated Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, and several planning studies were undertaken to determine the feasibility of corridor-wide bicycle improvements. One of those studies was the 2010 Fairfax to San Rafael Cross Marin Bikeway Feasibility Study by Alta Planning. This study laid out an east-west bicycle route connecting Fairfax and San Anselmo to the most populous city in Marin County, San Rafael. Today, the route laid out in this 2010 Study is still considered the alignment of the Cross - Marin Bikeway, which together with the North - South Greenway is part of Marin County’s primary bikeway network. Portions of the Cross - Marin Bikeway have been completed, notably in San Rafael, but gaps still remain, particularly in San Anselmo and Fairfax.

WTB-TAM continued to take International Study Trips to the Netherlands every year or two. After each trip, Study Trip delegates would return to their own communities with a sense of mission and purpose and a desire to start shaping their transportation systems to look more like the Dutch system. Unfortunately, many delegates encountered resistance from their Public Works Departments, who told them that it was impossible to apply the  Dutch way of doing things in the American context because there were no design guidelines to tell them it was okay. WTB-TAM stepped in to organize the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) to remedy the problem. The result was NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide, first published in 2011 and updated several times since. Today, cities across the United States turn to the NACTO design guidelines to justify their multi-modal projects, and design innovations originally from the Netherlands such as separated bike lanes and protected intersections are now part of the American transportation lexicon.

During the International Study Trips to the Netherlands, WTB-TAM made contact with numerous transportation engineering and design professionals and firms. One of those firms was ipv Delft, world leaders in bicycle tunnels, bridges, and context-specific design in sensitive wetlands environments. WTB-TAM International Study Trip delegates were shown several of ipv Delft’s signature projects, including the Hovenring in Eindhoven. In 2015, WTB-TAM brought ipv Delft Senior Project Designers Adriaan Kok and Ivo Mulders to Marin County. During their time there, Adriaan and Ivo presented many conceptual designs for the North - South Greenway and other bicycle projects in the area, and delivered a lecture on Dutch bicycle path design in San Rafael City Council chambers.

In 2015, WTB-TAM started working with SMART and the City of San Rafael to design the Andersen Drive to Second Street segment of the SMART Pathway (a.k.a. North - South Greenway). This key segment would link downtown San Rafael to the Cal Park Hill Tunnel. Unfortunately, the General Manager of SMART at the time argued that there was not enough space within SMART’s right-of-way to build the pathway on this segment. WTB-TAM had to pull out the stops and convince SMART to follow through and build the Greenway alongside the train, as promised to the voters who approved Measure Q. WTB-TAM hired ipv Delft to do the engineering and illustrate that in fact the pathway could be built with the pathway cantilevered over the adjacent creek. In the end, WTB-TAM brought together leadership from San Rafael to work out a plan with SMART to convert East Francisco Boulevard to one-way traffic and build the Pathway alongside the railroad. The segment cost $9 million and opened in 2020.

In 2015, Patrick Seidler and Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey joined forces to create the North - South Greenway Business Plan, a map outlining the completed segments of the North - South Greenway (south of Larkspur) and the SMART Pathway (north of Larkspur), as well as the gaps. They took the Business Plan to the MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) and used it to win $19.8 million in funding to complete gaps in the North - South Greenway in Marin County.