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How to Be a Better Transportation Advocate (Carter Lavin)

Kea Wilson24min

Speaker 1

00:00

Kea. Hey guys. I'm Kea Wilson. Welcome to the break. So there is a big difference between knowing what is best for your city's transportation system and knowing how to fight the often fierce political battles you need to win in order to make that system real. Lucky for us, though, my guest today has written a manual that can help transit nerds like you and me do exactly that win from picking campaigns out of the tangle of interlocking transportation challenges that ensnare so many of our cities to identifying the people we need to defeat and the ones we need on our side and everything in between that we need to be successful. Carter lavin's name might be familiar to you because he's a former guest of this show and a past contributor to streets blog, as well as a longtime activist who's made his name winning battles for people centered cities in the Bay Area, as well as training activists all over the country to do the same. And now he's the author of a fantastic book called if you want to win, you've got to fight, a guide to effective transportation advocacy, which one reviewer called, quote, the book The transportation reform movement has been waiting for. It's me. I was the reviewer. I was very proud to endorse this book. If you want to win, you've got a fight is available now. Anywhere books are sold, you should absolutely buy it or ask your local library to pick up a copy. But for now, let's get a little preview. Here is my interview with Carter Lavin.

Speaker 2

01:44

Carter Lavin, welcome back to the break. How are you we are talking the day after your book publication day. How are things in your neck of the woods? Great.

Speaker 3

01:54

It's really wonderful. It's great to be back on the break. It was fun talking with you. It feels like a very long time ago having this book out about how folks can fight and when the transportation changes they want to see in their community. It's great seeing people from all across the United States, from Canada, from Australia, chiming in a person reach out from Portugal. You know, a lot of people want their communities to be a lot better. It feels pretty cool to have written this book for them to have an easier time making those changes.

Speaker 2

02:21

Yeah, you were saying a little bit in our pre show, like, turns out a lot of people would like to cross the street and not be killed. You know, that's shouldn't be a surprising thing, but unfortunately it is sometimes in the United States. And you have written an incredible book called, we should say the title, if you want to win, you've got to fight, a guide to effective transportation advocacy. I know a little bit about the genesis of this book, but why don't you tell those who might not know about who you are and how you came to be the author of the manual on how to be an effective advocate for transportation

Speaker 3

02:55

reform. Yeah. So I thank you. So I train bike, transit, street safety advocates across the country, in the California San Francisco Bay area, I lead a transit advocacy group. I've been involved with over 100 campaigns, from like statewide billion dollar budget fights to super local efforts trying to get a bike rack installed in a certain spot. And you know, so I wrote, If you want to win, you got to fight so people can more easily win the changes they want for their community, whether they're experienced advocates who've been doing this for a while and are just very frustrated at the pace of change, or maybe they're folks who have never gotten politically involved before, who maybe even a little intimidated. You know, I interviewed dozens and dozens of successful advocates from across the country to put their wisdom and their lessons into this book and to really help make it as approachable and easy for folks. Because, you know, as Bill McKibben, the Climate Champion, said this review, like this isn't magic, it's work. Like politics isn't a mysterious thing that only a special select few can do, like we can all do it. And so I wrote the book to help people do it

Speaker 2

03:56

better. Absolutely, you said that word politics, which is one that occurs throughout the book, most prominently in the very first chapter. It's called politics isn't a dirty word, which I love that title of a chapter, because it's so true. And I'm just curious to hear your framing on it. Why is it so hard for urbanists to get engaged in, like moving power in the political space, and maybe to flip that around a little bit. Why is it so easy for us to treat the project of making our cities better as theoretical, rather than political as like sim cities or something that we're just doing recreationally?

Speaker 3

04:30

Yeah, so politics is happening all around us all the time, whether you like it or not, like you are in politics, you're in the news. The news is not some NFL match, that you really can't join the field like you're in it. And I think for so many people, they are very used to being kind of consumers of this, that they are passive consumers of politics. They follow it, maybe even as a hobby. And there's a lot of people who are terrified of it. They find it extremely distasteful. And as I say in the book, in chapter one, we. Is very much for this type of person. A lot of times when people think about politics, they're thinking about partisan politics, you know, red versus blue, Democrats, Republicans, things like that, which is a small, very noisy, but it's just a subset of politics that politics, by definition, is the interactions between individuals and society. You go for a jog. You cross the street, you're interacting with other people. That's a political moment when you impact others. And so I think, to your question, it can be overwhelming for folks to think about this as politics, because it's a huge concept, and it's a lot easier to say, well, I don't want to deal with this. I like trains, because big metal go fast is nice. And to be clear, like big metal go fast is nice. Like, I, you know, I like trains too. And there's a lot of people who come to us who are like, we're right. I like bike lanes because getting hit by a car is bad. And if there's a concrete wall between me and the car, I don't get hit by a car. And if that means a parking spot goes away, I stay alive. That's worth it. This is a math problem, and I'm right. And I think one thing that's so frustrating for a lot of folks, and especially listeners here, people familiar with the break and street spot, is it doesn't matter that you're right. You know, as folks, I talk to advocates across the country, and people said, like, yeah, you can be right and get your butt kicked all the time in politics, which naturally does engender for a certain type of person in extreme dislike of politics, because they say, Well, if only there weren't for politics, I'd have everything I want. Yeah, except for that's not how reality works like you. There is no way of removing politics from transportation, because transportation inherently impacts others. So therefore we're like, we're stuck with politics. So hate it or not, I don't care. How are you going to win? How are you going to become politically powerful? How do you become politically skilled? Which, you know, chapter one helps people kind of make peace with this big moment, and the rest of the chapters explain. Here's how to do it, like okay, given that it doesn't matter as much if you're right or given that it matters that you're right only to a certain extent, how do you build the power you need to win

Speaker 2

07:13

absolutely and you have to start by breaking up all that is wrong with the world right now into pieces and campaigns. So I'm just going to kind of walk through some of the chapters of the book you go on to talk about the idea of selecting a challenge, of taking the rat's nest that is the modern transportation system and starting to untangle it, picking a thread and working there. There's a lot in the book, but what's your number one tip for picking a battle in your community and transforming it into a fight that you can win,

Speaker 3

07:45

I think, and I recognize this is a little silly coming for me. Pick one battle. I personally am a big fan of picking multiple battles at once. You know, I have this regional measure for saving transit in the Bay Area. I'm one of the CO leads on and doing a couple other things. But when you're getting started, pick one battle, which is to say, if you are saying, Okay, I hate bus service in my community, bus service is terrible. Okay, a lot of things fit under that umbrella. And for you, you might say, look, getting more frequent busses seems too hard. You could pick that fight. But you say, like, Look, I just want to have a place to sit while I'm waiting for the bus. I'd like to not wait so long, but in the meantime, it'd be nice to have a bench. So that's one thing. You want benches. So now there's a question. Let's get a little bit more complicated. Do you want one bench at every stop? Do you want one bench at every stop for every bus line in your system? Do you just want the benches at the stops by senior centers. Like, what do you want? Or maybe it's those benches, but we want bench maintenance and so kind of helping recognize that every single one of these things is a separate campaign. It's a separate thing to ask for. It's a separate thing to win. I find that very helpful in terms of kind of quieting out the noise of the world of like, okay, there's all these problems. Okay, let's focus it in, because then it becomes a lot easier to say, got it. I actually want to increase my community's budget for bus, shelter maintenance. The people in charge of the budget are the city council. Got it. So now I need to target the council. Let's do a petition. Let's do a coalition letter. Here's all these tactics which chapter seven talks about. Let's get people on board now. We have a goal, we have a target, and we have a vehicle for delivering this political power, and that's just so much easier once you have those visions. Rather than say, well, stuff sucks throughout my hand, what can I do about it? Plenty of things. Just pick one, start.

Speaker 2

09:41

Pick one and start, and then also persist. I think it's the next step. Yeah, the hard part. So, you know, you go on in the book to talk about you. A great line that I'm trying to paraphrase about how a lot of transportation advocacy is just doing something, having someone. Tell you you can't do that and then doing it anyway. Or getting past the cants, like this idea of the cants was really provocative to me. What are some of the most common cants that transportation reform advocates tend to encounter as they go through these campaigns? Or maybe, if you want to just take a story or two that you've encountered with your clients, and how do you overcome them?

Speaker 3

10:21

Yeah, so a classic one would be, oh, we can't do that. We don't have the money, you know. We can't build that protected bike lane. We don't have the money. And so part of that saying, Okay, well, we can get you money, you know, is that a question of, do we want to get money reallocated from part of the city budget dedicated to public safety that's not saving many lives and put it to bike lanes to save more lives. Or do you say, Okay, let's get money from elsewhere, and that could be new revenue, which is always very hard to get a tax pass, things like that. You say, Okay, well, let's talk to the county. How much money is the county spending on street safety improvements in our community? Okay? What about a state law? Okay, great. We fought a thing. We want a thing. Now. There's more money for this program. Can I get my bike lane now? And they say, Oh, well, okay, so thanks for the money. That's really nice, but we can't do it because the businesses don't like things. Okay, I'll talk to every single business on the road. Show that it's not all businesses disagree with it. People often might think such a thing, but they almost certainly haven't talked to every business. For example, in my community, there was a bike lane pushing for and, you know, people might say, oh, all the businesses don't like it. Literally, there are two flower shops across the street from each other. One flower shop super on board, the other flower shop doesn't like it. So not only is the business community divided, the floral section, the flower shops of the business community are divided, which is really, I think, for folks that recognize that when you encounter a camp, when someone says that's impossible, a lot of times people just say stuff. And if you haven't checked, if you haven't pushed against that barrier, you don't know if it's real, you don't know if it's brick, you don't know if it's marshmallows. Like someone might say, oh, all the businesses hate it. Okay, I'm gonna go check with all the businesses. And that's some like, huge advantage that we have in the transportation space, as I talk about in chapter five, specifically around coalitions, is our world isn't infinite. You know, if you're someone who wants a bus rapid transit line on a certain corridor, okay, well, maybe there's 500 businesses on that corridor, or 100 or 50 or five. You can talk to 500 businesses or 50 or five like it might take a while. You might have to send a mail merge or get a bunch of volunteers with you, as you should, but you can actually talk to everyone, and you can talk to them about why this matters, and you can build community and support for this, which is essential to women.

Speaker 2

12:47

I do want to talk about Chapter Five a little bit, and I want to step outside of the scope of the book slightly, because obviously, you wrote this, you know, not yesterday, but you know, prior to this, very like interesting. We're in a very weird political time in America right now as we speak. Katie Wilson was just elected the mayor of Seattle, like, less than 24 hours ago. It was officially called for her. Zoran mandani recently as like, a week or so ago. What is time? I don't know. It's been a minute very recently, won the mayorship of New York City, and yet we are in a still, in a time that is more politically polarized than ever. How has the task of building coalitions around transportation reform changing with everything we got going on? And how do we figure out who are like, who should be in our coalition, given how divided we are on so many political

Speaker 3

13:41

issues? Yeah, and it's tricky, and it's kind of painful, and it's something that does interact with transportation advocacy. This is a tough time, and it can be tempting to say, well, it's not a fight. I don't want to get involved. This stuff is not what's this have to do with our bus lanes? What's this have to do with our bike lanes? But you know, politics is about our community, and so in transportation is a place where we all engage with the world, which is to say that so many of these politics of, you know, ice kidnapping community members, or, you know, spy cameras everywhere, like this. This has huge implications in transportation and your transportation advocacy, whether you're transit, bike, street safety or rail, it is very easy for your stuff to feed into that if you're not intentional about it, and it's easy for your transportation politics to be liberatory. There are people in your community who do not want spy cameras everywhere, and they do not want those cameras feeding information to ice. And if you show up and you say, traffic violence is a scourge upon our community, people are dying, and I would like speed cameras everywhere. You're going to have conflict. And if you go up and you say, we are at a time where our community is under attack, and we need to make our community safer, and that's why I want a million speed bumps. And these protected bike lanes to help protect lives. Because I'm on Team life. I'm on Team joy and keeping our community together, you're going to find more friends and allies. And so a big part, which I recommend folks do. And as Chapter Three about context and five, really talk about find your partners. Figure out what is the value that you're bringing into this. You know, for some folks, you know they're into transit because they ride transits like, okay, but you're not the only one on the bus. You are inherently acting in solidarity with others. You want their lives to be better. And maybe you're doing it selfishly because you want your life to be better too. Well, good news, your your liberation is very literally bound up in each other. And so I think in this time as you're talking about of division and like hardship, recognizing that transportation and public transit is literally something that brings us together. And so when we work hand in hand with our community members, you know, this gives us a great opportunity to make new friends and to connect with folks. Because one of the most important things to remember when thinking about politics, and especially when you come from a lens, where, when you think about politics, you think red versus blue, or any of that stuff, is most people don't vote. Most people in the United States of America do not vote. Most registered voters, most people of voting age even don't vote, and so that means red versus blue is not the biggest political concern in a person's life. A person might not think about red versus blue, or they may not think about their other concerns. But there's plenty of people in your community who, if you try to pass out a flyer about street safety, they'll walk by you because they're they're like, I don't take flyers, I don't talk to people, save in the whatever, and I don't care. And then if you they see like, oh, wait, you're talking about this street right now, this thing I'm experiencing right now I'm about to cross the street. Sure, wait, tell me about what's happening. What are we talking about? And that is like superpower that we in the transportation space have, that we are this place of community healing, because we are in it together. We can only win together. And it's the part where the rubber really hits the road about saying, Hey, does your Government care about you? Yes or no. Do you want the government to care about you? Do you want the government to help out? Okay, let's, let's help. Let's make this happen. Let's

Speaker 2

17:20

make this happen. I mean, you know, we've been kind of going chapter by chapter through the book, but your last comment made me think about something I appreciated from the book as a whole, which is how you threaded each chapter through with small stories about advocates that you respect, advocates who are putting the principles in this book, which you did not create. To be clear, you know you are dry and you credit like your influences throughout who's putting those principles into practice? I was wondering if you could just maybe share a little bit about what transportation advocacy campaigns or specific advocates really inspire you right now. Who did you get inspiration from as you were putting this book together, and who inspires you looking forward to the future?

Speaker 3

18:01

Yeah. I mean, one of the hardest parts about writing the book was the word count, keeping it under and there was a part where I had to stop interviewing people and just focus on writing, because it was such a joy. It was such a joy to talk to advocates across the country about what they're doing to make the world a better place. I could do that all day long. It was really a great joy. And there's a lot that really stuck out. One that comes to mind, there's an advocate in the Roanoke area who uses a power wheelchair to get around. He speaks to an interpreter, and he's an amazing transit advocate, and he has this great story that did this interview with him and his crew, and basically he brought the vice mayor of their town to come around with him and just show like, here's how terrible this experience is, like, here's how hard it is to use the bus. Here's what it's like to be me. You have power do something about it. And one thing I find just so inspiring about that is it's such a perfect encapsulation of how a key to effective politics is to make your problem, quote, unquote, the thing that's your problem, make it into the problem of the person who has power. Like it's not actually your problem that you're waiting for so long for the bus that's your mayor's problem, or that's the bus agency's problem, or that's your governor's problem. And the more that you own that problem as yourself, and the less that you make it someone else's problem, the more that it's just going to be you suffering. To be you suffering, not someone else. And our political system is perfectly fine with you suffering. You need to make it someone else's problem if you're going to get someone else to solve it. And so that, you know, I found his work of just saying, Hi, I have all these things I have to deal with just to live my life, and I'm going to bring an elected official out here, get a reporter, have that moment. I found that extremely inspiring. One thing I really loved out of folks, out of ride New Orleans, they talked a lot about bringing in the joy in this kind of, like classic New Orleans second line culture. They talked about, like, this can really be a bummer. Sometimes we don't win as big or as fast and as often as we want. And they. He talked a lot about what they do to make it a joyous experience and keep people involved and like, make community out of this, which I admire, and I really personally just try to bring into my own advocacy. A great part about writing the book is it helped me being a stronger advocate as I continue to be a practitioner in the Bay Area. And it was also just cool seeing, like, in Pittsburghers for public trend, like, they were very, like, organized in their organizing, like, very systemic about how they do it, which was great to see how, kind of the Union background of law tree Wiens was the leader there, like, how she was, like, regimented in a way, it's like, oh, that's like, powerful to really have your system down and be working so closely with bus operators as well as riders. I mean, I could, I could go on and on and on. It was so cool. And there's so many people I talked with who I really appreciate their time. And it didn't make it into the book, unfortunately. And, you know, just like people who said, Yeah, I was that one weirdo in town who liked bikes, and then I got 100 kids to ride a bike with me, and now the mayor cares about this. I absolutely love all those moments where people go from, you know, here's where I was. I didn't have what I wanted, and so I did something totally new, and I got something totally new. And that's a lot of what advocacy is. One weirdo

Speaker 2

21:18

who rides a bike. I know a lot of those are my favorite people, Carter, this has been really fun. Is there anything I haven't asked you about this book that you think it's particularly important for a streets blog audience to know that they might not already know about it? I will certainly tell them where to buy it and how to send it around, but

Speaker 3

21:38

last call. Yeah. So real quick, I want to talk about chapter six, inside, outside game, one of my favorites. No thank you. It's, it was fascinating writing it because it's something that in other advocacy spaces, it's a fairly known concept, and just bringing it into our world was really great. And a big thing that, you know, there's a whole chapter. You should read the whole chapter in the whole book, but the kind of short version is, don't yell at staff at agencies just because they're the people that you know and you can access like they're not the people to yell at. It's the elected officials, and maybe yelling is not the first thing to do with them, but recognizing how to collaborate with the people who are inside the process so that you get the outcomes you want. Because a lot of times, you know, when you're yelling at Department of Transportation person or person at a transit agency, you know they're also mad that they don't have as much power, that they don't have that magic wand to make you happy. You know they have other systemic issues that they have to deal with. The answer is to make it you and them against the problem. The problem isn't that the bus agency is being jerks, and they're deciding not to run bus service. They want to run bus service. You need to work with them to get the money so they can run the more service, so that they can get the money so they can hire the people to run the service. And so I really recommend, especially for the streets blog crew, who are folks who are in it, and I've already rolled up their sleeves, like Chapter Six is a really great one to maybe jump ahead to or work your way through, just a lot of love for chapter six. Chapter

Speaker 2

23:06

Six is a gem, and I just think this is a the rare kind of manual that you can kind of read cover to cover. It's engaging, it's practical. It is something that I think has inspired me and my own advocacy work locally, and I learned a lot from it. And, you know, just want to thank you for writing it. I think it's I meant it when I said in my blurb that this is the book we've been waiting for, because I've been sharing with a lot of people in my life, and I hope many people continue to do so, because I think it would have an impact. Thank you. Well, thank you for

Speaker 3

23:38

everything. Thank you. And I hope people get it either from Island Press or their local bookstore or ask for their local library. And I'm so excited for people to lend it to their colleagues and dog your pages and write in the notes, this is the training manual for your organization ad, so I'm excited for people to do all sorts of fun things with it.

Speaker 1

23:58

Okay, that's our show. Thank you so much again. To my guest, Carter Lavin. You can pick up his book. If you want to win, you've got to fight a guide to effective transportation advocacy anywhere books are sold. If you think this podcast was worth more than you paid for it, namely, nothing, you can support the show by leaving us a positive review on Apple podcast Spotify, or anywhere else you listen, you can make a contribution to our parent company, streets blog USA. At USA dot streets blog.org just click that donate button. Or you can just tell a friend to tune in. It really helps us find a few more folks to listen to the show. The break is a production of streets blog USA. Our theme music is egg shells by Christina Johnson. I'm your host and editor, Kea Wilson, before I let you go, same question as always, what is one thing you have done today to help end car dependency? You're gonna find a lot of ideas in this book, but in the meantime, let me know. Kea.

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