Some links:

http://www.thunderheadalliance.org/index.asp
http://www.completestreets.org/
http://bikesbelong.org/index.cfm
http://bikeleague.org/ (League of American Bicyclists)
http://www.bikelib.org - League if Illinois Bicyclists (which has a lot of excellent links like the http://bikelib.org/commute/index.htm and http://bikelib.org/muniguide/index.htm , which has all kinds of information about planning to make communities more bike-friendly).

In my surfing, I also found an interesting site called. "LAB Reform" http://www.labreform.org/ which helped me understand why LAB wasn't as conspicuous among the other advocacy sites as I might have expected.

I don't think I"d mind bike paths if they were well-designed and then (gasp!) maintained and kept clean. It reminds me a little of the "separate but equal" concept. "Here, we built you a path - now go away!!!" (I do use p aths and sidewalks when they make sense for me.)
It's complicated - yes, some of the bike paths here are okay, but the mindset *about* them stinks (far as I can tell, it's only coincidence that they're okay in places, *not* because of planning). However, if the goal is to get more people on bikes, in a lot of places that could mean paths - if only because an awful lot of people seem to think it does. (Here, that is much less true. Our roads and drivers are much less hazardous-seeming than in bigger, busier places.) So, while around here I lean towards educating people and encouraging riding on the roads we have (per http://www.bicyclinglife.com/Effecti...clingNeeds.htm ), I suspect I might think differently if I were in a differnet place and dodging different traffic.

I think an educated public can help. I know in Illinois, every year monies that had been allotted to things like cycling would simply get "given back" to the treasury and put somewhere else - so it looked like things were being funded, but then the dollars went away. When the word got out and people used their voices, a much smaller amount of those monies disappeared. WIthout organizations like LIB people like me would be clueless. It seems to me that one of the best things to do is to join a local and/or national cycling support org because the more people that belong to them, the more clout they'll have when lobbying. If there are 2000 people in the whole state who belong to a bike group, whelp, that's definitely a "small interest group." If it's 10,000 it might be a movement...(50 people a day, and all that ;-) :-))

WHen I'm on the path and somebody goes by me on the bike in the road, I want to say, "YOU ROCK!!!"