Summary
What do they do? MCBC is the distinct California nonprofit EIN 68-0419394. It works on street/trail access, cycling education and youth bicycle access. Its public return identifies four major program areas; the calculation does not substitute the much smaller road-program expense for the whole recipient's cost. More
Why this approach interests us
- Technical review can improve a reconstruction design before it becomes expensive to change. Bikes and supported riding can also enable genuinely additional physical activity.
Our main reservations
- Current corridor crash exposure, MCBC's residual contribution and cash-created capacity are unmeasured. Favorable assumptions supply more than 100% of signed expected health because other worlds include net harm.
What do you get for your dollar?
The research list uses the central scenario: $457,782,005 per 10 Bay QALYs. The signed subjective mixture is $28,647,385 per 10 Bay QALYs; the central scenario is $457,782,005. These charge the whole organization while quantifying two pathways, not its complete expected value. Inspect the model and assumptions.
- whole expense
- $1,425,170 — Original FY2025 Form 990; all programs and overhead retained.
- bay mixture
- $28,647,385 — Per 10 Bay QALYs; subjective, signed and partial-health.
- central
- $457,782,005 — Near-zero net benefit; highly unstable as a precise price.
- favorable
- $2,626,225 — Still above $1M; 10% declared scenario weight, not measured probability.
1. What do they do?
MCBC is the distinct California nonprofit EIN 68-0419394. It works on street/trail access, cycling education and youth bicycle access. Its public return identifies four major program areas; the calculation does not substitute the much smaller road-program expense for the whole recipient's cost.
Improve a live design rather than recount old projects
San Marin Drive has an unresolved reconstruction opportunity. Quantify only a judgmental improvement in injury risk attributable to technical design and implementation work beyond agency and partner baseline; no campaign persuasion or election-strategy effect is modeled.
Bound the period of additional safety
Apply a finite interval before the alternative design catches up, delayed to construction. Annual fatal and serious-injury rates are explicit unverified priors, not measured local crashes.
Count additional activity, not bicycle handouts as health
Start with a historical Cory's Ride participation floor, then require extra sustained activity beyond other exercise and a finite utility proxy. Do not award lifetime cardiovascular prevention to each participant.
Keep the organization's full resource boundary visible
Retain school education, trail, administrative and fundraising costs. Other benefits remain unquantified. Agency construction, volunteers and other partner costs are not fully priced, so this is not a complete social-resource ratio.
Scope of this review. One annual whole-budget equivalent supports a share of a finite road opportunity plus one youth cohort. Future road benefits are not annual outputs to repeat every subsequent year; repeated gifts cannot each claim the same completed project. Safe Routes to Schools, other corridors, trails, accessibility, air quality and wellbeing may matter but are not silently assigned zero.
2. Monitoring and information sharing
Whole legal recipient EIN 68-0419394
Original FY2025 IRS Form 990. Expense $1,425,170; reported school program $666,915, Cory's Ride $190,882, road work $104,257 and off-road $85,744.
Our assessment. Retain whole expense rather than road-only numerator. Program statements establish mechanisms, not causal health outputs.
1.6 miles west of Simmons Lane, within a 2.7-mile San Marin corridor
Official MCBC concept announcement, July 16, 2026. Buffered/protected lane concepts and possible intersection changes; analysis remains necessary.
Our assessment. A real design opportunity, not built lanes, verified crash reduction or a priced additional donor task.
Proposed ARC pipeline, not a bicycle route
Marin Water current project schedule and funding disclosure. Environmental review and design ongoing; estimated construction 2027–2029, operation 2030; schedule conditional.
Our assessment. Agency baseline and complementary resources must be separated from MCBC technical contribution. No water-health benefit credited.
Four-lane undivided road conversions
FHWA technical evidence summary. Summarizes 19–47% total-crash reductions and 29% across 45 sites.
Our assessment. Total crashes are not fatalities, and San Marin has a median and differing intersections. The model's severity effect is an explicit judgment.
12 road diets and 25 comparison sections, California/Washington
FHWA 2004 matched before/after primary evaluation. Approximately 6% lower crash frequency; rate analysis did not indicate a statistically significant safety effect.
Our assessment. Small observational sample, exposure and selection issues; preserves health-null and low-effect worlds rather than assuming the larger summary effect applies.
60+ Cory's Ride middle/high-school participants
MCBC 2025 annual report. Participation and supported riding documented; school program operates under TAM/Parametrix baseline.
Our assessment. Not additional physical activity or measured utility. Completed infrastructure and program aspirations do not count as current marginal outcomes.
122 Spanish adolescents
2022 school randomized intervention. Knowledge improved but cycling/active commuting rates did not change.
Our assessment. Education alone need not create activity. Cory's equipment/ongoing support differs; uncertainty is not automatic zero.
53 children aged 10–13, 12 weeks
2012 randomized cycling-to-school trial. No significant randomized-group fitness difference, P=.486; substantial cycling uptake also occurred in controls.
Our assessment. As-treated fitness associations do not replace randomized findings or provide a QALY conversion.
43 previously noncycling children in Denmark
2012 randomized trial, primary abstract. Cardiometabolic composite improved 0.58 SD; fitness difference was not statistically significant.
Our assessment. Supports a plausible health pathway, not finite QALYs per Marin child or lifetime disease prevention.
60 schools, over 29,000 students in program footprint
Current official Marin SR2S description. TAM-managed infrastructure, guards and education financed through established arrangements.
Our assessment. Footprint is not a measured donor-created participant denominator. No 29,000-person health multiplication.
3. Qualitative assessment
Technical review can improve a reconstruction design before it becomes expensive to change. Bikes and supported riding can also enable genuinely additional physical activity.
Key reservations
- No contemporary corridor fatal/serious-injury denominator verified.
- Large street-configuration and severity transfer uncertainty.
- Ordinary-gift additional work and project implementation are not observed.
- Whole cost retains substantial programs whose health is unquantified.
- Favorable tail exceeds signed total; central is near zero, not precisely known.
- Public and partner construction resources are not fully priced.
- Reported financial summaries differ; original filed expense takes precedence.
Benefits not included in our estimate
- Already completed guardrails, paths or past projects credited to a new gift
- All county residents or school footprint treated as changed health outcomes
- Water-supply benefits from the ARC pipeline
- Lifetime youth cardiovascular prevention or repeated annual credit for the same road project
- Trail access, other street work, SRTS, accessibility, social connection and air quality: unquantified, not zero
- Election/campaign persuasion effects
4. What do you get for your dollar?
$28,647,385 per 10 Bay QALYs
Weighted finite Bay health per annual-budget equivalent is 0.4974869442335213 QALYs. A bounded $10,000 analytic gift yields 0.003490720013987954 Bay QALYs. This is not a verified donation package. The central net is just 0.031132066861424303 Bay QALYs per budget equivalent.
A better life is our comparison unit of 10 additional quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), potentially spread across people. These are uncertain estimates, not measured returns or verified donation offers.
How we calculate the estimate
Whole-gift finite signed health: gift / whole expense × funding response × Bay share × [(annual fatal burden + annual serious-injury burden) × safety reduction × discounted additional exposure years × MCBC contribution × realization + additional active youth × utility × duration × nonoverlap − harm]
0.003490720013987954 Bay QALYs per $10,000 in the declared mixture
Model inputs and assumptions
- Whole expense
- $1,425,170 (range: FY July 2024–June 2025). Original IRS return controls. Public annual report shows $1,420,027, a $5,143 lower total not reconciled here. No separately netted event expense or inventory cost appears on the return to add back. Filed accounting anchor.
- Baseline fatalities on affected corridor
- 0.10/year (range: 0.03–0.20 in nonnull scenarios). Not observed San Marin incidence. No contemporary multi-year corridor series was retrieved. Avoids assigning a countywide death burden to a 1.6-mile concept. A single reported fatal crash does not estimate a stable annual rate. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Baseline serious injuries
- 0.50/year (range: 0.20–2/year). Distinct surviving injured people, not all crashes or all injuries. Rates require corridor and severity verification. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Finite health per fatal/serious event
- 10 / 2 QALYs (range: 5–15 / 0.5–3). Integrated finite healthy years lost or disability burden, not observed local ages or permanent lifetime multipliers. Fatal and nonfatal people are disjoint; no injury benefit added to someone already counted as a fatality. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Local injury-burden reduction
- 20% (range: 0, 10–40%; signed diagnostics permitted). FHWA total-crash evidence is not a causal fatality coefficient for this median-divided corridor. This parameter includes design/severity transfer. An older primary study found modest frequency change but no significant rate effect. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Additional exposure and delay
- 3 years after 4-year delay (range: 1–5 years; 2–6-year delay). Counterfactual convergence window, not physical asset lifespan. Integrate (1.03)^(-t) over delay to delay+years. Finite fatal Q is already integrated; do not multiply by another survival horizon. Judgment informed by project status.
- Annual funded work's share of incremental design improvement
- 25% (range: 10–50%). Contribution of this annual-budget work cohort relative to agencies, designers, other organizations and MCBC's own past/future funded work. It is not credit for all MCBC effort over the project's life. Future MCBC work is neither free nor credited to this gift: its share must be excluded here. This is separate from realization and ordinary cash response. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Implementation realization
- 50% (range: 25–80%). Whether the relevant design is built within the modeled window, conditional on technical work. Includes unresolved approvals and complementary public resources. No claim that the pipeline is already approved. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Cory's Ride cohort
- 60 (range: 30–120 modeled people). 60+ participants reported for 2024–2025; 60 is a conservative floor, not 60 observed additional active riders. Scale .5–2 is judgment about current delivery. Participation is not a unique long-term outcome audit. Historical floor plus scale prior.
- Additional sustained activity
- 30% × 50% = 9 youth (range: 10–70% uptake; 30–80% beyond alternatives). First fraction means extra cycling among recipients; second removes replacement of other exercise/access. Neither is a trial-estimated local response. Repeated participants/activity periods must be deduplicated here. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Finite physical-activity utility
- 0.01 for 0.5 year; 80% nonoverlap (range: 0.003–0.03 for 0.25–1 year; 50–80% nonoverlap). Generic short-term physical-health proxy, not a measured EQ-5D gain or converted fitness score. Excludes injury prevention already in road pathway, future mortality and separately added mental-health gains. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Ordinary cash response
- 50% (range: 0–80%). Additional organizational work from an unrestricted gift beyond already financed activity. Distinct from clinical/behavioral alternatives, partner contribution and project realization. No priced residual capacity verified. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Bay benefit share
- 98% (range: 98% across declared worlds). Marin setting but road users may live elsewhere. Same share applies to harms; not verified beneficiary residences. Judgment.
- Additional adverse health burden
- 0.1 QALY per budget equivalent (range: 0–1 across worlds). Residual injury exposure from new riding, displaced traffic and other health burdens beyond the baseline safety reduction. Not a valuation of inconvenience or political disagreement. No overlap with injuries already netted in safetyReduction. Very uncertain / judgment.
- Joint subjective worlds
- 20% funding-null; 20% health-null; 10% harm (range: 20% cautious; 20% central; 10% favorable). Locked before first calculation. No assumption was tuned to a target ranking; favorable outcomes do not determine the central estimate. Judgment, not calibrated probabilities.
$10,000 analytic illustration—not a priced project or student package
- funding-null: No positive finite price. 20% weight; no additional Bay health.
- health-null: No positive finite price. 20% weight; no net clinical gain or burden.
- harm: Net harm: -0.49 Bay QALYs. 10% weight per annual-budget equivalent; no positive finite price.
- cautious: Net harm: -0.012040949493146364 Bay QALYs. 20% weight; small benefits do not offset the declared adverse burden.
- central: $457,782,005 per 10 Bay QALYs. 20% weight; road Q 0.12753483032943735 plus activity Q 0.036 minus harm 0.1, then funding 0.5 and Bay 0.98.
- favorable: $2,626,225 per 10 Bay QALYs. 10% weight; 5.426687207598657 finite Bay QALYs per annual-budget equivalent. This is not an expected or recommended return.
- without-favorable: No positive finite price. Other weights renormalized: -0.05020197391816046 Bay QALYs.
- no-road-benefit: No positive finite price. Weighted Bay Q -0.009661942499999993; equivalent to zero MCBC technical contribution while retaining youth activity and harm.
- no-activity-benefit: $38,780,254 per 10 Bay QALYs. Road-only quantified benefits; all costs and harms retained.
- zero-harm: $22,368,347 per 10 Bay QALYs. Even removing the entire adverse-burden prior does not reach $1M.
- half-road-risk: $58,429,560 per 10 Bay QALYs. Halve both baseline fatal and serious-injury rates; no other inputs changed.
Uncertainty. This is a whole-cost, two-pathway exploratory model, not a complete organization valuation. More than 100% favorable-tail share (109.082%) is mathematically possible because other scenarios reduce the signed total; it is not a probability. None of these six subjective scenarios is below $1M/10 Bay QALYs; that is not evidence of zero real-world probability. Corridor burden and current MCBC marginal response are the main unobserved variables. Publicly funded school services are not credited as newly created by ordinary donations. Finite duration and partial scope may omit meaningful health, rather than proving it absent.
5. Funding and previous grants
Not a current top-ten giving recommendation on this evidence. A useful case requires corridor-specific safety data, an additional implementation task and a credible ordinary-gift response—not retrospective credit for completed infrastructure.
FY2025 return revenue $1,573,506, surplus $148,336, net assets $479,220, liabilities $73,806 and cash/savings $449,808 do not establish either excess reserves or an unfunded opportunity. The annual report's different revenue/expense summary is unreconciled. No current incremental staff or design-task price was verified. An official donation link exists, but checkout was not independently inspected, so no donationUrl is supplied. Whole accounting expense includes all four program areas; it is not the full cost of public construction, volunteered time or partner capital. The broader water project is baseline context, not a free donor-purchased intervention or an MCBC benefit. Incremental street-design construction and maintenance costs remain unpriced; completeResourceCostPer10 is null.
This review does not establish a verified marginal funding offer or a complete history of grants.
We have not verified a suitable donation route for this reviewed activity. Confirm the legal recipient and intended allocation before donating.
6. Sources
- MCBC original FY2025 Form 990. IRS via ProPublica. Primary. Published: Submitted 2026-02-19; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- Novato Needs a Safer San Marin Drive. MCBC. Primary. Published: 2026-07-16; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- Atmospheric River Capture project status and funding. Marin Water. Primary. Published: Undated current page; 2026 review timeline; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- Road Diet Desk Reference: Why Consider a Road Diet?. FHWA. Official evidence synthesis. Published: Undated agency technical summary; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- Evaluation of Lane Reduction Road Diet Measures and Their Effects on Crashes and Injuries. FHWA. Primary. Published: 2004; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- 2025 Annual Report. MCBC. Primary. Published: 2025; November upload path; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- School-based cycling knowledge and commuting randomized trial. Aranda-Balboa et al.. Primary. Published: 2022-08-05; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
- Randomized cycling-to-school fitness trial. Borrestad et al.. Primary abstract. Published: 2012-05; retrieved: 2026-09-11; abstract via Europe PMC API.
- Bicycling to school improves the cardiometabolic risk factor profile. Østergaard et al.. Primary abstract. Published: 2012-10-31; retrieved: 2026-09-11; abstract via Europe PMC API.
- About the TAM program. Marin Safe Routes to Schools. Primary. Published: Undated current page; retrieved: 2026-09-11.
Annual expenses: years and sources
Average annual expenses (three consecutive fiscal years): $1,408,963. Organization size is separate from the modeled cost-effectiveness of a donation.
Marin County Bicycle Coalition
Form 990/990-EZ reported whole-entity expenses; includes program, administration and fundraising costs, but excludes any costs netted against revenue.
Latest original return and prior-year comparative combined with earlier filing data.