(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 560: If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Carter Lavin to discuss his new book If You Want to Win You’ve Got to Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy. We discuss the mess and practice of politics, how we have more power than we think as advocates, and how we can get the policy results we deserve.

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Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood: Carter Lavin, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Carter Lavin: Thank you, Jeff. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be back.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure,

We are a transit advocacy group in the nine Bay Area County region. I’m also the author of the book that just came out. If you want to win, you’ve got to fight a Guide to Effect on transportation advocacy. From Island Press, which I wrote because there’s a lot of people in the world, a lot of your listeners who want the world to be better, who have great ideas about what needs to be done, but are having a hard time winning those changes.

And so I wrote a book about Here’s how to win. I interviewed dozens and dozens of activists from across the country, successful by and trans and street safety advocates to get their stories and how they won or how they lost, and condense it down to about 200 pages so that. Whether someone’s trying to get more rail service or a speed bump that they say, okay, now I, now I know how to go about doing it.

Hopefully we get a lot more people fighting and winning.

The way I think of it is the journey’s always been happening because I’ve been a climate activist since I was a teenager. You know, I’m, uh, my mid thirties now. And when I was a teenager, people say, oh, well, you know, far off in the future. You know, 2025, you know, 2030, California’s gonna be on fire all the time with climate change.

And I was like, well, I, that’s not bad for the people in the future. I’m gonna be a person in the future. And so I’ve always been very. Aware of this. And I had a whole career in the solar industry and the rooftop solar industry because, killing coal was an essential part to how we stop climate change.

And that entire time in that industry, we made a lot of progress to fight, you know, tooth and nail against a lot of different entities to win. And I kept seeing on the transportation side of things, like us not making the level of progress I would like to see from a climate perspective and just from a community perspective that.

The bike lanes, the transit service, all that stuff wasn’t happening at the speed and scale that I and you and so many of your listeners wanted. And so several years ago, I kicked up this fight to get a bus only lane on the Bay Bridge, which spoiler alert, we haven’t won that yet. But through that experience, which I talk about in the book, in the intro in chapter one, you know, to help me get a lot more firmly in the transportation advocacy space.

Which also helps show me that there is a ton of space. There is, at no point will someone say, Hey, we’re full up. We have too many transportation advocates. No, too many transit organizers. Like, Hey, stick to your life. Like, no, no. There is so much need. And so did a bunch of stuff, helped put together Trans Bay Coalition and throughout this process that kept being this, how do we learn to be better activists?

How do we teach more people to be better activists? Because people would say. Hey, that’s great about your bust lane fight there. I’m trying to get something done in Santa Clara County. How do I do this? It was like, oh, well here’s how to do this. Here’s how to, make a crew and form a coalition. You know, things that chapters four and five talk about.

And, you know, over time I just got much more into this active process of training activists across the country, which I still do independently through my business. Art lab.com has more details on that. And, you know, through the training, through the writing about the, through the presentations. I talked to Island Press, or they reached out and they said, Hey, would you like to submit a book proposal?

I said, oh my God, it’s a book contract. They’re like, no, no. You have to submit a book proposal. So that was a lot of work. Did that, they said, yes. Then I wrote a book, and so at the one hand it’s the journey started about two-ish years ago when they first reached out. But you know, I think for me, this journey also really started as a teenager in the suburbs of DC who.

Could bike into the big city who could bike to metro and take the red line hen who like moved to Philadelphia and had all these experiences and you know, just recognize like, oh, we want this. And living many years of realizing that, okay, it doesn’t matter that we’re right. You know, it doesn’t matter that like, yes, transit is mathematically the way to move a lot of people from point A to point B.

That a protected bike lane is a way of getting a lot of people safely onto bikes. It doesn’t matter that we’re right. We get a clock clean all the time. It’s like, okay, so. Given that we know what the answers are, how do we actually win them? Like how do we get this? And that has been work of study in practice for many years and shows up in the book.

And I am interested in this discussion about. Politics writ large or small P politics and like the difference between that and like what’s happened in the country as, you know, it pertains to like partisan politics and the mess that that is.

It’s,

This is great. But the process of getting it, they find very distasteful. Mm-hmm. You know, it’s like they want the meal, but they hate the cooking and it’s, I get it. You know, it’s a very different thing. Like one thing about transit personally that I think really appeals to a lot of people is like. There is a logic and a clarity and it’s, you know, it’s straight lines and things like that.

There’s like a kind of a beauty in logic to it. And then you look at the political process and you say, Yee, this is like a lot of like big feelings and people and ego and who knows, and oh my God, and this is so scary and this is a big mess and it makes everything worse and I just want it to all go away.

And you know, there’s three big things I like to say about this, which I talk about in chapter one to really focus on. Because if we don’t accept the fact. This is deeply political that if that mess is part of the beautiful thing that we want, that, you know, we can’t get the high speed rail systems that we want just by drawing lines and doing math.

Like we have to do the messy politics. So like we have to get comfortable with the mess. So there’s three things I think about as I talked about in chapter one. One is you’re doing this already, like you are already in the mess. Like you are not separated from that. So like, you know. Terrible news. The call is coming from inside the house.

Like, so you, Jeff, like this is a, yeah. Like this is a deeply political thing. You listener right now are engaging in a political act by listening to this. This is, as they would say in the political space, like you are being radicalized, you are learning about politics. This is a political act right now.

So kind of recognizing like, oh, we’re all, this is happening. This is part of our life. This is not something that like you opt into in October of a election year. Like this is all the time. Politics is all the time, which gets us to two, which is politics is simply the act of people and society relating to each other.

And so all of that’s politics. So partisanship, the really noisy, annoying part, you know, red versus blue, all that. That’s a segment that is a small, noisy segment of politics, but everything is politics. You know, you talking to family members at Thanksgiving about how to take the bus in town or any of that stuff like that is political because you are impacting other people’s lives.

So recognizing that politics is kind of everywhere. Not only are you in it, but it’s everywhere. And then thirdly. Yes, it might be noisy and seemingly chaotic, but there is a logic to politics like this is something that can be figured out. This is like an ecosystem, and a person might see a jungle or a coral reef or any other ecosystem and think, oh my goodness, I couldn’t possibly map this out.

It’s like, well, except we do. We do this all the time. We say, okay, well beings, they’re like, we’re all political beings. They have needs, they have wants, they have things that they’re trying to do. They have tools for trying to do it. That’s why this book really lays out, here’s all these types of things and why chapter one, you know, starts with like, Hey, this is political and this is in fact radical.

And I don’t care if you think this isn’t politics. I don’t care if you don’t want it to be politics. It is, I think so you should learn to embrace that, or at least begrudgingly accept it, because then you could start saying, okay, given the thing I want is really political, given that my speed bump requires a political struggle.

The question now is, how do I win a political struggle for a speed bump? You say, oh, okay. I need to get elected officials on my side. I need to get community members on my side. I need to talk to people. I need to do all these things. Here’s how I organize it. Oh, that’s chapters, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And that makes it a digestible problem that when the people see this noise of politics and I see the energy and passions and the twists and the turns and all that stuff, and recognizing okay, that’s.

Ecosystem. There are maybe not necessarily rules to it, but there are patterns in that and the patterns are recognizable. And so if you’re the kind of person who listens to a podcast like this and you know, maybe can decipher a Tokyo subway map, like you can also decipher American politics. It is not.

I would say it’s slightly less complicated than some of the subway maps.

You know, like your speed bump inherently, like literally disrupts the lives of those around you. Like that is in fact what you’re going for. You are saying people are driving too fast on this road. I would like to disrupt that pattern that is disruptive and there’s conflict in that. ’cause there’s some people who don’t want that, but something that’s.

Really important for the conflict avoidant among us, myself included. Are you sure? Oh yeah. I, we, that’s a, we could talk a lot, uh, like a great thing about politics is that it’s a lot of indirect conflict. Like for someone who’s maybe a listener in a small town, they say, you know, my mayor keeps ignoring me.

And I’ve, you know, had a training session with a person who said, you know, I tell my mayor all the time about bikes up and my mayor ignores me. And they’re like, what do I do? Like, what do I say to them? It’s like you don’t say anything else to the mayor. You say you talk to 200 other people in your community, you get them to like the bike, then you get them to talk to the mayor.

that’s you having conflict with that mayor, but you don’t have to actually deal with them. And so for people, as you’re saying, who are like, Ooh, this is noisy and I don’t wanna deal with that, it’s like, great, you don’t have to deal with that. Like you could talk to the people on your side and get them to do stuff and get them to call the mayor and have that conversation.

That’s what you’re doing and like recognizing that there are so many different roles and there are definitely roles for the, you know, there are people who are conflict diverse, there are people who, seek conflict and we need those people as well. And, you know, kind of recognizing that there’s space in all of this sport.

Yeah.

Yeah. Those types of things. Folks have a lot of power though, and they haven’t used it yet. So if you’re listening to this show, obviously you’re into this already and you have more power maybe than you think.

Part of that power comes from the fact that if you’re listening to the show, you might know what a Ballard is. You might know the difference between a speed hump and a speed cushion. Like there’s the Jeff Woods archive that you can now search through. that is not even a master’s level, that is a PhD in this stuff.

And if you’re someone who’s just casually listened to the show over the years, or just recently picked up, like you are now head and shoulders above the average person in your community in terms of knowledge of this stuff. And that’s wonderful. And that means you have a better insight into where to pick the conflict that you wanna have.

So for example, bus buildouts are not exactly a epsy thing. They are the concrete extensions into the road so that the bus stop is not just the flat sidewalk goes into the road. I’m sure some of your listeners might wanna correct me on how I explain that, but that’s generally the gist of it. It is both good from a backup, calming perspective, and it’s good from a.

Transit facilitation, speed perspectives, and it’s great for accessibility, makes it easier and more comfortable to ride the bus. Your listeners know that or some, you know, they can listen to any number of episodes. Jeff, feel free to insert the episode number here of that one to per personal learn and you’re like, wow, that’s great.

It’s a cool, so then take that idea, you know, reading through my book, particularly chapters two through four. Help a person say, okay, well it’s now I know what we want. I know what the solution is. Now’s the easy part. I just need to get other people involved. Okay, so let’s write the petition. Let’s get the coalition letter.

Let’s talk to other people about it. Basically, if you want to think about this as you all be experts listening, like you have all this theoretical knowledge, you know what works in your community. Now the next up is to make it practical. Apply it, saying, okay, we know that bus bulb outs are good or ho slip lanes are good.

Where are the slip lanes in your community? And you’re saying, okay, we want to get the slip lane on Main Street closed. Okay. Just that one. Or there are a couple other ones. Like, let’s talk about, let’s get that data, let’s make that petition, let’s do that coalition. Whether it’s talk to the community, let’s put this knowledge that you have into action, because no one out there is saying slip lanes.

Now keep this open. Like there’s not a counter protesting movement who’s like trying to collect a thousand signatures around this stuff. Like one great part about fighting the war on cars, so to speak, is we already don’t have so many of the things that we want. Like we are on the attack. Like there’s no compromised position you need to take because you already don’t have the thing.

Like we are trying to remove the slip lanes or close those kind of things, or get the protected bike lane, or improve the bus service or get the high speed rail built and you as an activist, like, what’s the mayor gonna do? Ignore you. Okay, cool. They’re already ignoring you. So just make it harder for them to ignore you.

Make it higher consequences for them to ignore you. Like you are not gonna get fired from your random job as long as you don’t work for the city and you’re doing this, like you’re not gonna get fired from your job for doing this. So do it. You know the consequences that. Your county supervisor can enact on you.

One, they don’t even want to do that, but like if you’re like, let’s get thousands of people to sign this petition saying we want to close all slip lanes in my city because they’re deadly and they’re killing people, and it’s better to save lives than speed up cars, what they’re gonna say, no, congrats.

They’ve already said no to you, so you might as well roll up your sleeves and get fighting because that’s the only way you’re gonna

Yeah.

Regional measure effort in the Bay Area that’s needed to keep it alive and get involved if you’re in the Bay Area. I didn’t create bart. I wasn’t like, I wasn’t around. And so I’m internally grateful for all the people who’ve done that. That every sidewalk that you yourself have not built or advocated for, like that exists because of somebody else.

So on one level, yes, there is like so much stuff that hasn’t been done on another level, another layer. So much stuff already has been done. There are beautiful rail lines out there and bus services and things like that. We’re actually here to say, great, let’s take it further. And that’s not gonna happen unless we fight for it.

That you know, someone may have not handed you the baton in your community. Say, Hey, this is the bus advocates from the eighties or nineties, and here you go. And if you’re someone who’s listening to this and been waiting to be invited into the fight, here’s your invitation. go out there, go fight. If you wanna win, you gotta fight.

The book is. Available on Island Press. I’ll help you do it. Yeah, you can make those changes. And I think helping people recognize that like every improvement’s worth doing, and even if it’s just, oh, I want there to be a better bike rack in front of my coffee shop. Great fight for that. Go push for that. Go talk to the coffee shop owner.

Go talk to your city, figure out what that is. Worst case scenario, go install it yourself.

Well, Carter’s book tells you how to solve it, and there’s a lot of discussions in your books specifically about how you define who makes policy, what’s the inside outside game, what’s the process like for making these changes? And I appreciate that you actually laid out like the definition of who a decision maker is.

Tried to pull the, the curtain down around what lawmaking actually is and how it works. And so there’s all these things that, I’ve been in this for 20 years almost now, and there’s a lot of things in this that I was like, well, I feel like I knew that kind of on the outside, but I didn’t really think about it in the way that the process is, you do this, you do this, boom, you can win.

Writing my book. I was like, this, my book is the sequel to all of those. Or if you’ve read my book first, it’s the prequel. You should check out those other books because it is so important to understand what these issues are and, you know. Let’s talk about our car transportation system and how our freeways are overbuilt and the high cost of free parking like that is extremely important.

Like it is important that we are right as a movement, and it is great that that is extremely well documented that we’re right and you can be right all day and get your claps clean. And I think any one of your listeners, and we all know that this happens all the time, people who are wrong win a lot. that’s not good.

Being right does not automatically guarantee that you’ll win. And so we need to learn how to fight more. And so if you wanna win, you’ve gotta fight. Pick up where a lot of those books leave off and my book doesn’t tell you what to fight for. You know, obviously like point at some things like, hey, this is transportation and bikes and street safety, and all these kind of good stuff.

You could read this and say, I would like to remove a freeway. Or you could read this and say, how do we get a high-speed rail built? Or how do we get more trained service or protect our bus service? Because as we were talking about, this is all part of that ecosystem of action. you know, chapter one explains, Hey, this is political.

Gets people comfortable. Chapter two talks to people about how to even think about a campaign. Like who are these decision makers, you know, when you, when people say. Well, I want better bus service. It’s like, well, good news. The person in charge of bus service has a name. They’re in your community. You could find them.

They have a title, they have a email address. They have a phone number. They have people that they listen to. They have people that they care about. We have, you know, let’s kind of talk about power mapping, which is not an idea I came up with, but it’s bringing them in from other spaces, which chapter three talks about like how to understand your context and cultural connections.

Slowly but surely helping people build out these campaigns because everything is a campaign. You could say, well, I want to get bus service returned to my community, or to, I want the bus stop to be moved two blocks over. I don’t like the stop being there. I want it to be here. Those are all fights that’s all stuff that takes an effort to make happen.

Yeah, and so I think these, like the transportation reform space is really blessed to have so many wonderful thinkers who told. All these stories who’ve done this work to say, here’s what the problem is, here’s what the solutions are. And I wanted to make sure that I, or this book was not setting agnostic, but it’s not the, here’s how I want a thing.

’cause I don’t want someone to think, oh wow, Carter Lavin helped win a billion dollars for trans in California. You know, or any of the other things I fought like it was, yeah, good for Carter Lavin, but what’s that mean for you in Memphis or in, Tallahassee or you know, Arkansas. It’s like, yeah. So the book takes away a lot of like the narrative of advocacy, which was a very interesting writing experience of saying like, we are talking about cooking.

Like instead of saying, here’s a meal saying, so here’s how to hold the knife and cut the celery or whatever, cut the vegetable of your choice. Uh, so it was a lot of like deconstructing the story because so often, you know, people see the news, they see the news about what’s happening, they’ll say, oh yeah, I saw that transit funeral that the people in the Bay Area did, and that caused a huge hullabaloo.

So do I do a transit funeral? How do you do a transit funeral? And it’s helpful to say, okay, so that actually was like the outcropping of this gigantic network of other things. And so like, hey, chapters four through seven help you understand that because we aren’t taught this. You know, people aren’t taught how to make change in our community.

Or maybe you had a civics class in high school. but besides that, this isn’t information that’s just freely given. And when it is, it’s generally not. Given for kind of us transportation nerds. like it’s generally said, okay, okay, here’s, big political movement spaces or other spaces where someone’s like, okay, that’s great for like the healthcare industry.

Or, you know, pick any number of issues ’cause people fight on any number of issues. But like, but what about us in the transportation space? And so I really wanted to make, if you wanna win, you gotta fight. Speak very much short through because we gotta fight.

Right. You have to say what the folks in, Illinois did about like the bike lanes on the shoulders and things like that. Right. So, yeah. You gotta get into a little bit of storytelling ’cause that’s what people gravitate to toward the most part. But it is kind of a kid of parts. Right. And, and also.

If you did tell the story of like how Nashville lost their transit election to a bunch of like AV lovers, like, you know, you don’t know all of the machinations behind the politics of it. And also all the people in that story are different from the people in your story, right? Yeah. Like, and the people in your neighborhood are gonna be different from that.

And that goes to like the idea of context, right? Like, so you talk about context in the book and I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about that, because I think it’s interesting to think about the cultural, the historical, the political context of things that you’re trying to get into.

And you know, and I talk about some stories. There’s Jose from Minnesota. He tells this great story about how. When it comes to freeway removal, he first starts talking about the whole history of what was there before the freeway, what was the community, what was lost, and how that really helps get people fired up.

And so it’s like great to tell that story in the book or a little snippet of it. And it’s so important to help people understand like your community’s different, every community’s different. In the United States, there’s some probably big overarching things that make a lot of our communities similar in terms of car dominance and what our community tends to spend money on.

But a big thing is helping folks understand like, what is happening in your community today? You know, maybe you are, you don’t think your mayor cares of any, okay, well, they’re gonna like the official, how did they do in their last election? Do they win by a lot or by a little? And the answer to that changes a lot about your campaign.

It changes a lot about who you go to say, well, okay, do they listen to these groups or those groups like. Okay, in these groups, is it group A, B, C, or D? You know, helping people understand this and helping map out their community is so essential because if you don’t understand that, it’s very easy to view your opposition or your target as just this huge wall, this big model at this undifferentiated mass of No, and it’s really helpful to say, okay, well, in talking about street safety, yes, my.

Local chamber of commerce or what have you, doesn’t really care so much about this. Okay? But maybe the individual businesses do, especially the business right here where they saw a person get hit by a car. I’ll talk to that business and slowly but surely, you kind of build up your supporters this way and you know, so chapter three really helps people understand how to translate from like bollard speak of.

Hey, you can’t say to someone like, hi, local business owner. You were listening to Overhead Wire recently and they were talking about this. They’re like, no, I’ve never even heard of what you’re talking. Or maybe they have, maybe your people are real cool, but like, how do we translate this and put in terms that people care about?

So the second half of chapter three really talks about that of saying, okay, now that you know, what are these points of connection? How do you translate? How do you sell to people based on their values? Which is something that. Was delightful in my interviews with dozens and dozens of advocates across the country to like see what that looks like in their community and how that kind of reflects their community’s culture.

Because you do have to get specific, even though I think one thing that’s interesting about transportation advocacy is high speed rail is objectively the best way to move people between, was it 200 and 500 miles or something like that. Like it doesn’t matter what continent you’re on, it doesn’t matter what hemisphere.

Like That’s true. It’s like, okay, cool. What are the people in those different cities in your community, what do they care about? You know, all that matters. And helping understand how to localize your advocacy is really important because, you know something I’ve seen before, you can’t say to someone like, oh, hey, you should vote for this thing or support this.

Good. It’s good for everybody. I say, okay, that’s good for everybody, but what about me? And you know, it is our job to say, great point. So, hey, this street that you’re crossing, you see how that car’s really dangerous right now? If there were this speed bumper, this intervention, they drive slower. And so you have a safer time crossing.

But, oh, okay. This is good for me crossing here because I go to that coffee shop. I get it. And so chapters two, uh, three particularly focus on like how do you get to that level of like translating your big values of the vision or I saw this thing on YouTube and that looked really cool and I wanted in my communion.

It’s like, okay, so. Here’s how you translate the wonderful things, Ray, if City nerd was saying about what happens in other communities into like, how do you talk about it in your neighborhood, which goes into chapter four of saying. How do you work with your crew now? How do you work with these allies and so on from there?

You know, like one thing of is funny about advocacy is there’s this big push to efficiency. Like you wanna be really good and efficient. At the other hand, like you do wanna create something that takes as many people and absorbs as many people as possible, because having a lot of people on your side is inherently like one of the things we are trying to do.

So, you know, if you’re like, oh, well I can get a robot, they’ll knock on a thousand doors. Like, yeah, that’s not helpful. Like you need to talk to the people, you need to do the work, like doing the work matters. And at the same time you’re like, well that sounds, doing the work sounds like work. Like yeah, it is.

And it’s hard. It’s not, and it’s often not paid at all or paid very poorly and the hours are long and stressful. And so getting good at asking for help, getting good at structuring the work so that people can help. Is essential and it’s different. So I have strong opinions about what works for me and my organizing in the Bay Area, especially for this regional transit funding measure, which is super essential to pass.

And what’s gonna work in different communities is different. so some communities, they really do want the like weekly meeting where at the meeting we have the first 30 minutes we talk about everything and the next 90 minutes is we do a bunch of work together. And that just like a regular thing.

It’s like going to the gym, it’s a workout, something. I personally, I do a lot of regional organizing, so showing up in person is really hard because fundamentally we’re organizing people across like hundreds of miles. and a thing about being a transportation advocate is it tends to be hard to get with your fellow transportation advocate.

’cause the thing that unites you is, hey, isn’t it hard to get to the place where we want? And so for me, I think one of the big constants is, you know, making it easy for people to step up, making it meaningful. So it’s not just make work you, you know, you have to do something that has a difference. And as I say in chapter four, like don’t make it hard for people to say no to volunteer.

Make it easy for someone to say yes. So for example, like an hour ago, I had a call on a Slack channel saying like, Hey, does everyone here have a stack of flyers? Who wants a stack of flyers for passing out about the regional measure? And someone’s like, oh wait, I don’t have a stack of flyers yet. I was like, okay, do you, do you want us to like send you the PDF so you could print it or do you want us to like hand deliver a stack of flyers?

Thank you so much for raising your hand. And that’s just part of the work of like, okay, breaking the task in. And I think one thing that’s so important to think about when you are like newer to being a volunteer leader, like a leader of volunteers, is recognizing the need to like. Break down the task as much as possible.

Basic kind of management in that sense, while also creating space. So if someone says, oh yeah, no, I know how to do that. I’m happy to take the ball and run with it, but you don’t like continue to baby them, you say, great, here you go. Like have fun, like go for it. And that’s tricky ’cause you never really know.

And I like, I think about it like. If someone’s saying, Hey, it’s the holiday season, I’m gonna come over. I’ll help you cook dinner. How can I help some people? You could say, great, I need you to make the mashed potatoes. And they’ll be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about some, okay. I need you to build that pot with water, put it on there and turn it on, high and put potatoes in it.

When it’s rain, they’re like, okay, that I can do. And so recognizing that different people want different stuff and that it’s all volunteer, you know, people can walk away the second they don’t feel like it. It is good to be nice because that’s just inherently a good thing. And if you’re a big old jerk, people aren’t wanna work with you.

Like that’s a huge thing. And I think that’s just a, it’s important to be nice for a lot of reasons.

You have to get approval from the state, you have to do all these things. you have different opinions probably about like what kind of tax that should be. Should it be a sales tax, should it be a gross receipts tax? Should it be a property tax? Should it be an employment tax or whatever it is? How do you get to those final decisions and go forward?

Yeah, that’s a very good question.

And so I find that extremely helpful in terms of saying, okay, well what are we gonna do about that? And so some people might say. For example, Hey, I support transit and I want AC Transit and Bart and Muni, hell train to not die. Okay, how do I help? It’s like, great. That’s a good conversation. We can talk about that.

here’s the flyer, here’s the thing. Go all this stuff. for some people when it’s like, oh, we’re having a disagreement about, well I want a bike lane, or you know, I don’t care about your bike lane. I don’t wanna lose these two parking spots. Okay, well then we’re in disagreement. You know, we could talk about the two parking spots.

We can talk about. Okay. It’s two of 20 parking spots on the street. It’s two of a hundred parking spots, you know, in a quarter mile radius. You know, we can have that conversation and maybe someone still says, yeah, I disagree. You know, like, okay, cool. Well, we’re not in agreement about that. I’ll move on.

I’ll get other people. And I think one part that’s so important, and chapters two and three talk about this a bit, is like, it means a different thing if it’s. Some random on the street who disagrees with you versus a local business owner versus your mayor or your governor, and therefore, what you need to do about that changes.

If it’s some random person on the street who disagrees with you, it’s okay, go talk to another person. The elected official, when they’re saying, oh wow, a thousand people signed this petition, for them, generally they think, okay, is it a big number of people? You know, maybe you’re in a smaller community and getting just 50 people to sign the thing.

We’re like, wow, 50 people, and they’ll say, okay. What do like the general number of people think? I’m like, okay, here’s some big number of people they agree. I’m like, okay, that’s good to know. And they’ll say, okay. And there’s like four other people who I really care about this stuff. Like, here’s the person I listen to about this stuff.

Here’s the person I, I don’t wanna tick off about this stuff. I’ll check in with them. What do they have to say about that? And they’re like, okay, great. I formulated opinion. And so one thing to your original question about like politics and disagreement and agreement is recognizing that agreement as a purpose.

So consider, how important is it? for example, you know, there’s a, a bike lane effort in my community that I’ve been pushing for that’s, you know, in the process of happening and you know, people might say, oh well the businesses, they don’t like bike lanes ’cause it’s, parking spots and blah, blah blah.

And I went to a custom sofa shop who was on that door. Door like, you know, I’m just knocking on every door. I might as well go in. I don’t think they’re gonna support this ’cause a sofa shop and I figure like trucks or whatever. And they said, oh no, we all bike to work. The custom sofas get delivered from the factory.

What? You know, whatever. Like, oh, okay. Cool. I’m glad I asked. And I think one thing in our transportation space is a lot of times there are folks who might be so overwhelmed by the enormity of car culture and car dominance. That’s all around us that the concept of finding allies, it’s easier to think, you know, no one agrees with me, but, well, you, haven’t talked to everyone.

So go talk to people like guess what, you’re on the bus. There’s other people on the bus with you. You want better bus service. There’s inherently like a bunch of other people on that bus with you will agree. And so going out, finding ’em, and you’re not just agreeing for the sake of saying like, Hey, let’s go.

I’ll go be friends and talk about how much we love the bus. Which, be friends. Talk about how much you love the bus, but like do something with that. And so if someone says, Hey, I don’t wanna flyer, you say, okay, cool, I’m gonna pa pass out flyers. Do you want to help design a flyer? Do you wanna do this?

Or. How would you like help? And they might say, I don’t wanna help. They’re like, okay, cool. I’m gonna go talk to people who do.

Yes. Like you can tell people that are crossing a busy street why that busy street might be dangerous to them in their high heels.

If you are saying to someone like, Hey, watch out. You should feel a different thing about how you feel now. Like, Hey, that street’s dangerous and here is a thing you could do about right now. Like here is a flyer, here is the QR code. I’m not asking you to like show up at some meeting in three days and put something on your calendar and wait for four hours.

I’m saying, can you add your name to this list? And someone’s like, oh, okay, cool. That’s easy. I can do it. Because otherwise, if we’re not asking people to do something, if we’re not putting that agreement to use, what we’re really saying to a person in the street safety world is like, Hey, right now, feel bad.

Like, Hey, is your kid at the street corner? You should feel bad right now. You should feel afraid. It’s a lot easier for that person to say, no, I think I want to feel annoyed by you and ignore you, rather than feel bad about what’s happening in my life right now. Like that doesn’t, nah, that’s not good.

That’s not what I want. And so saying, Hey, just a heads up this thing, the street isn’t as safe as it could be. Here’s the thing, can you sign it? We’re trying to get it fixed. They’re like, okay, yeah, I’m open to that idea because you’re giving me something to do with it. And I think this comes up a lot of times in.

All sorts of advocacy spaces where if we’re fundamentally just trying to tell a person, Hey, feel bad right now without any sort of, and do something with it. Like, but like, no, I don’t want to, that seems not fun. And this is, for people who are familiar with like union organizing spaces, they say it’s educate, agitate, organize, like agitating people, disrupting their day, letting them understand like, Hey, this could be better.

This isn’t good. That is very useful. If you then organize it, otherwise you were just agitated peoples.

Right? That’s not really bad cop. It’s just good cop, rowdy cop.

There are people who are making that decision, who have close access to it. So that might be the mayor and the city council and the staff to that, and the people that they listen to. And maybe that’s a city employee, maybe that’s a close advisor or a personal. Then the outside is just literally everybody else.

So all of us are somewhere along the spectrum of inside, outside, and it changes depending on the issue. Like it’s the holiday season. If you and other people in your household are talking about household decorations, like you are very much on the inside of that decision making process. I am on the outside of that decision making process.

And your mayor is on the outside of your decision making process around your household decorations. So it’s all the stuff. All the stuff. And so when it comes to talking about. Getting a new bike lane in town, you know, there are people who maybe have inside access, maybe they’re people in your community who have donated to a mayoral campaign.

Maybe they door knock, maybe they’re personal friends, maybe they’re on some bike commission for the city and whatever. There are people who have like inside knowledge of there. And then we have other folks out there who are just the people in the community. And if you’re saying, Hey, we both want this bike lane to be built.

You have different positions, that you’re coming to this from, which chapter six talks about in a lot more detail. Like, you know, you’re coming to this from different decision making process points. You have different levels of access, you have different types of power, and so it’s very natural that there might be inherent tension that, you know, the person on the bike advisory committee says, oh yeah, that road is slated to get a bike lane in six years.

And I know it took us 20 years to even get that slated for six years. So I’m not gonna like light my hair on fire and make a whole ruckus. And the other person who’s outside the process says, cool, that’s six years from now. My kid is six and I need this now. Like our understanding of what is urgent is really different, and our appreciation of what the amount of work that goes in is very different.

And so it’s very easy for there to be tension between these like inside advocates and outside advocates. And. When they work together, they’re extremely powerful. And so chapter six really focuses on how to understand these kind of confusing relationships a bit better and how to work at them better.

Because it is so helpful when a person who has more inside access says the outsiders like, Hey, by the way, the mayor is showing up at this event pretty soon. That’s when you should deliver the thousand petition signers or. The person on the outside says, Hey, we’re doing this giant rollout bike ride soon.

I’m happy to pass out a flyer. What’s the thing I should be passing out on that flyer? And there’s so many other ways that they can work together. And so doing that is really essential. And it’s a concept to be very clear, I’m not the originator of biz. Uh, this is, you know, something that’s existed in a lot of other spaces.

The civil rights movement does a lot of great stuff on inside outside gain. There’s so much that we can learn from and you know, and I think also. A greater understanding of that as well as coalitions from chapter five, like just different groups working together. I find it makes the like angst of politics a lot easier to understand because it helps you go from saying, oh, well now I’m frustrated that person A, in my community who I want to be pushing harder.

Oh, I recognize we’re on the same team. We’re just in different positions. So now the question is not, why are they terrible? It’s how can I help them do better in their position? How do I do better in my position? How do we collaborate more? And maybe the person doesn’t wanna collaborate with you and you say, okay, well now how do I find someone who does collaborate with them and all this stuff.

But I, I find it makes the, like, fierce ecosystem of politics, you know, a lot less scary, a lot easier to understand. And so I think chapter six is gonna be a great delight to a lot of folks here who, you know, if you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance that you might feel very on the outside of your community.

You might feel like you are the only one you know, in Norman, Oklahoma who really cares about this stuff. If you’re a person who listens to this, there’s a good chance that you’re like, yeah, I work for the Spokane Department of Transportation. I feel like I’m the one true believer here, and I really don’t like that.

The other advocates just keep yelling at me as if I have a magic wand. It’s like, yeah, you can work together. Here’s how to work together.

Right. And I have a few examples in my head, but I just kind of wanna get the general idea out there.

You’re being a little too rowdy. You are gonna overturn the Apple card or I’m going to lose access to the powers that be because I’m associated. And a lot of times like, tough, that sounds like a new problem, but recognizing that the point of access is to do stuff. And I think one thing that is tricky is kind of syncing up of like, well, what’s the game we’re playing?

Are we playing, I want this one bike lane now, or are we playing, I want. 20 bike lanes in the next 20 years, like what’s gonna happen? How do we prevent overreach? And so it’s kind of always a dance and it’s an always an opportunity for people to get better at it. And one thing I’m hoping my book, if you wanna win, you gotta fight.

Got to Effective transportation advocacy helps people do is it helps provide the shared language so that you know, maybe you’re an outsider and you’re really frustrated with your insider ally. You say, Hey, here’s this book I just read. So I see myself as the outside person. You’re the inside person. Can we just like talk about this?

It’s like, hey, now we’re in like couples therapy and talking about our relationship, but like you should talk about your relationship with your advocates, like the relationship that you have with each other and like figure that out because you are in relations and so, and you know, they might tell you, yeah, no, hey outsiders, you’re right.

This is our relationship and you’re right. I am telling you to cool ed. Here’s why. And it just kind of helps ’em recognize like that they might need to explain that better or point to something. And if you find yourself as an inside advocate, frustrated with outsiders who are, overly rowdy, which is generally not the issue, our movement has, our, our movement is not overly rowdy.

Yeah. Maybe one day we’ll get to be and can write a sequel. Um, but, but generally speaking, it’s like. Helping them understand who they should yell at. You know, if you say, Hey, actually it’s, our mayor is fine. It’s the council that’s terrible. Go yell at them. Or, oh, okay, good. Thank you for letting me know. I will go do a this thing.

And so having that insight, having those conversations is really important.

Politics is a lot about making allies and like comrades and working together and coalitions and all this stuff with people. You’re going to make friends. You might find the love of your life through us, but like you’re not here to make friends. You’re here to make allies, and those are slightly different things.

You could be like, we work together well and I hate this person’s jokes and that’s. You’re like, I, there’s a whole part of this book that I had to take out where I got, I realized I got way too into that chapter four, how to work together with others. you know, I, know I’m not a perfect person yet.

I’m working there. Probably won’t get there within this lifetime, but like rec has a, okay, given that we’re all in perfect beings, how do we collaborate together? That’s a big thing and that’s a big part of transportation advocacy, and especially when. It feels so urgent because it is what we’re up against is urgent and big when it feels so hard doing that work, as I talk about in chapter four of learning how to work well with your teams is absolutely essential because there are so many forces that are going to pressure you to have a bad time, and so you have to intentionally work to have a good time.

Does it ever end? No, and that’s a great thing. You know, a thousand years from now, there’s going to be transportation problem a thousand years from now. As long as there are people, as long as people are gathered in some form of way that makes a society. And as long as those people leave their home and transport themselves, like there will be transportation, politics, and policies.

And I find that greatly liberating as a thought of recognizing that, you know. You, the listener, like Jeff, like you’ve been doing this for 20 years now. You’ve created an army of listeners. You have all this people, you have this gigantic backlog that you built, and the fact like, wow, that is just a treasure trove.

And then you’ve done all this work recently to make that something that people can mind through. Like, that’s great. And guess what? You have more years ahead of you. Like the future’s big. I mean, maybe you’re like, no, actually this is my last podcast. Spoiler alert. but like that’s cool to think like, oh wow, this is, we get to have long-term plans and I.

I’m very much on team. It’s either happening immediately or never happens, and I’m working on remembering, object permanence. But as a trained advocate in your community, you might think, man, I really want that high speed rail. And you say, well, that’s not gonna happen today. It’s, yeah, no, duh, it’s not gonna happen today.

And it might not happen in 10 years. It might take 20 years. Okay. Make a 20 year plan. And that might sound a little silly, but. It’s not gonna happen unless people plan for it. Unless people make it happen. You’re not gonna like wake up and like, oh my God, there’s a tree in there like that. Some people will, it doesn’t matter.

Yeah, it doesn’t naturally happen. It’s not a naturally occurring phenomenon. People fight for it and they build it. And so recognizing that, oh, we’re allowed to make these plans. We can do this stuff and these fights. Daisy chain, oh, we started this thing talking out. Years ago, six and a half years ago or something like that, I led a fight that I lost for the bustling on the Bay Bridge.

We don’t have it. We still could have it. that is a fight that we could pick up tomorrow. And everything we’ve done in the past like that builds and the Trans Bay Coalition that like formed in part because of that fight, all the political out, all this stuff builds and recognizing that. The stuff never ends.

It just as long as you do it right, you just keep building it and keep building it. And so yeah, one day you do make yourself the jugg out of a group locally in your community of saying, okay, you lost that bike lane fight. Okay, guess what? It still needs a bike lane. Keep fighting for it. You know, maybe you change your tactics, you go a more culture fight as we talk about in chapter two to like shift things around, like they’re not gonna install an antibi lane, but even in San Francisco, for example.

There used to not be a freeway at the Embar arrows, then there was a freeway, then there was a big earthquake, and there was a big talk about should that freeway exist or not. And it came within, I believe, one vote. And now there’s not a freeway there. And so there was a part, if you were a anti-free activist in San Francisco, you felt the whole world was against you.

You totally lost. You lost everything. But time moves on and things change, and they won eventually. And, planning on an earthquake is not the best of plans in the world, but like,

And it didn’t happen until, the earthquake and more push from the earth.

You can still build power locally, and that means when things shift on the federal level or when you help shift things on the federal level, you’re like, oh, okay, well now our congress member or our senator is a lot more protran because of all the stuff that you’ve done, or is a lot more pro street safety.

So that means when there’s the next big federal fight around this stuff, that your person is not someone you have to drag kicking and screaming and to supporting it. Someone who like already supports it because of all the great work you did. And so, you know, this is something that I invite folks here who do like thinking complicated systems, like transit systems, all that stuff.

There’s a lot of systems based thinker, like politics is part of that. And you could take action by building power and working with others and making coalitions and all the things that. If you wanna win, you gotta fight. Talks about like, you know, you can make plans the last decades and that’s pretty fun.

Maybe a little more depressing. It depends on how you feel. That particular day is like, is that fun or is that depressing? But I’m on team. That’s fun. Like we already don’t have the things. So like, okay, how do we get the high speed rail built faster? What do we need to do? Because what are we gonna do?

Build it less fast because you’re agitated for it. Like that’s not, that’s not gonna happen.

You can ask your local library to pick up a copy if you’d like to get a copy for free. Lot of local libraries have been picking it up already. Then other places. Good read stuff like that. for your international listeners, it’s becoming more available internationally and I think starting February, 2026.

So keep an eye out for that. Awesome. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found? Find [email protected]. If you’re looking for training sessions or one-on-ones or workshops for your crews anywhere in the English speaking world, happy to hop on a Zoom and talk to folks through this stuff. And if you’re in the San Francisco Bay area, please join Trans Bay Coalition.

Let’s get you involved in this whole regional measure to save transit and a lot of other things too. ’cause. There’s a lot of fights that we need do, and I wanna win it. So we gotta fight.

I really appreciate that too.

Like there’s this huge ecosystem where we’re like generating all this energy this great, just like people really excited. And then we get to, I get to come in and say, cool. So hey, did you listen to any of that stuff? Cool. Like get involved. Here’s, let’s apply that now. And so, you know, to your kind. A little teasey point earlier on, like, yeah, there was a part where I just like listened to your podcast and like, oh my God, Jess, I have such a huge platform, and tell people to sign that petition.

And I was like, oh, wait, no, I’m supposed to do that. I’m supposed to step in and do that work. And so recognizing that we all have our plan in our inside outside Allyships and our big coalitions, and so thank you for all that you’ve done to help make the ground a lot more fertile. Because 20 years ago, the average person’s interest in this stuff was way, way lower.

And I appreciate all the work you’ve done to help raise consciousness around us.