Cities concerned about global warming should look first at getting people to bike, walk or take public transit instead of hopping in the car, said bicycle advocate Martha Roskowski.

But that can't be done without the involvement of local elected officials, she told the 75 to 100 attendees of the Modeshift transportation conference in Chicago Thursday.

Then she asked how many in the audience were, in fact, elected officials.

Only one person, a 27-year-old city council member from downstate Urbana, raised his hand.

The Modeshift conference, sponsored by the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, focused on teaching people how to reduce their community's carbon footprint by getting people from here to there without relying on cars.

Upping transit dollars, creating safe and useful bike paths, avoiding sprawl and designing walkable spaces were among the ideas discussed. But an essential part to any action is elected officials, a group that was by-and-large missing.

“If you get the elected officials, the [municipal] staff and the people scheming together … that’s when you make real progress,” said Roskowski, the keynote speaker.

She said it is hard to get officials involved in such efforts unless they already happen to care about the issues. In her city of Boulder, Colo., for example, she said many of the successes were due to the mayor's love of mountain biking.

The six-county Chicago region puts out 104.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the air each year, said speaker Peter Haas, citing a study he did at the Center for Neighborhood Technology. That’s equivalent to the emissions from the whole of Greece, he said.

Throughout the six-county region, 31 percent of the gases come from transportation, Haas’s study concluded. In Chicago itself, where bike, pedestrian, bus and train use is higher, that percentage drops to 21 percent.

When working for change in a community, the Bicycle Federation first goes to whoever will be most friendly to the cause, be the person a planner, staffer or elected official, Executive Director Rob Sadowsky said.

“In Chicago, Mayor [Richard] Daley himself is extremely committed to global climate change,” Sadowsky said, adding that there are “bright spots on the City Council.”

Brandon Bowersox, the lone elected official, said his city of Urbana took reluctant council members and city staff on a walking tour of the pedestrian-unfriendly and handicapped-unfriendly downtown.

“People who could walk, we put them in wheelchairs just so they could experience it,” he said.