After his wife died of breast cancer, Congressman Jim Oberstar took to his bike, riding for hours, letting the rhythm of the road carry him through grief. The motion steadied him. The silence helped. The roads did not. They narrowed, disappeared, pushed him toward traffic, reminding him again and again that bicycles had never been part of the plan.
And Oberstar knew exactly how those plans were made.
A longtime member of the United States House of Representatives, Oberstar had spent decades working on transportation policy. He would eventually serve as Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, overseeing how federal transportation dollars were spent. From his seat in Congress, he understood how policy became pavement. What he saw from the saddle was a gap between intention and reality — one he believed could be closed.
So, he picked up the phone. John Burke answered.
Oberstar spoke plainly. He said he was in Washington fighting to secure real money for bicycling. Then he asked a question that caught John off guard: “Where are you guys?”
Not long after, John was on a plane to Washington.
At the time, the bike industry wasn’t organized for Washington, or present there in any meaningful way. Companies competed fiercely. Old rivalries ran deep. Advocacy existed, but it was fragmented — local, underfunded, and rarely aligned. There was no single group built to show up consistently, speak clearly, and stay for the long haul.
When John got back to Wisconsin, he started making calls. He wrote checks. He asked competitors to sit at the same table and talk about something bigger than market share. Eventually, enough people agreed to try.
Trek, Jim Oberstar, and the push for better bike infrastructure
They met near O’Hare, flying in from around the country and gathering in a conference room by the airport. The goal was practical: set competition aside to create an organization that could represent the industry, fund the work, and help turn federal policy into bike lanes, trails, and safer streets on the ground. That meeting became Bikes Belong, later known as PeopleForBikes.
With Oberstar championing funding from inside Congress and the industry organizing outside it, the effort gained force on both ends. Under President Tim Blumenthal, PeopleForBikes became a steady presence in Washington — aligning brands, retailers, and advocates behind shared priorities and building the coalitions required to move federal transportation policy.
The results accumulated. Federal funding for biking and walking, once measured in the tens of millions, began to grow steadily, eventually reaching roughly a billion dollars a year. Over the next two decades, tens of thousands of projects were built across the United States, changing how cities and towns thought about bikes, and streets, and who they were designed for.
Inside PeopleForBikes, Trek kept showing up. Not just with funding, but with time, people, and patience. Long-term investment made it possible to move beyond one-off wins toward systems that could scale: measurement tools that showed what worked, programs that could be replicated, data that helped focus effort where it gained the most traction. The work became smarter, more efficient, and harder to ignore.
Oberstar would remain in Congress until 2011, where he became widely regarded as cycling’s strongest ally on Capitol Hill. He kept riding, too. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the roads began to change.