Insider outsider does not matter to me. They are hell bent to put their thumb on the scale and get as much as they can from as much membership as they can, as any organization does.
Still, I've come to have a negative opinion of CBC. I say this as someone who fully believes that a bicycle's potential as part of a traffic solution/transit option is underutilized.
I only know of them passively through their website, the comments of their ambassadors, and some of the interviews they done on radio, other media outlets and even their own message boards. While I've taken all this in with an open mind, I have increasingly come to view CBC as the Northwest's answer to the NRA in that all of life is viewed with respect to a tool: a magical tool that they believe can cure society of all its ills.
While I believe their membership is a crosscut of the area, their professional and volunteer face suffers from a strange grandiose spiritual relationship with their bike. For them, its not simply a transit option, or recreational activity, but a tool they have some sort of spiritual bond with outside of its manifest use. After listening to them talk, one gets that sense its not enough to bike, but one MUST rearrange their world view as some sort of spiritual journey whose nirvana has a platinum bike atop a pyramid at its end.
In this context, the slogan "Creating a Better Community Through Bicycling" is indeed quite telling. Its not about improving cycling, its about the world from the eyes of the bicycle. I suffer from no illusion that crime would go down, if I carried a gun. Similarly, a bike does not lead to some magical utopia where there is no traffic, congestion, or accidents, repair costs, and so forth.
I've found the various advocates of CBC, will listen to the concerns of others only in that the get a chance to talk, and tell you why you are wrong. Your concerns do not penetrate them. They are out there only to offer weak platitudes, false identities, or to say they have some program that makes it better, in the effort to make it seem like they have addressed a common concern, while in reality all they have done is amplify their core message and upped the volume.
For example, Cascade Ambassadors live in world where bikes are generously separated from negative actions. Its a magical world where a person is never hit by a bike, there was no accident, rather a bike connected with someone who fell and sustained a injury, a fatal injury. Mind you this link is not about the frequency of bicycle collisions with peds, but rather a stunning display of just how bikes are viewed in a world colored by Cascade.
http://www.myballard.com/forum/topic.php?id=10254&page=2#post-147874
