Defending your bike and transit advocacy wins
A new transportation change is fragile. Help it take root.
You will eventually win some bike, street safety or transit change you advocate for. It might be huge or it might be small. It might also be a partial victory. But if you advocate for a long enough time, keep organizing and building power, and keep innovating you will eventually win something.
The bad news is that our victories are never set in stone. Budgetary or policy victories can always be undone or sidetracked in some way. Even when you win a literal concrete change, like a protected bike lane, it can be taken away by the opposition. If you want to win change, you’ve gotta fight for it; and once you’ve won a change you’ve gotta fight to keep it.
The organizing skills needed to win something are transferable to what is needed to keep the win, but your strategy needs to shift somewhat. You go from being purely on offense to having to play offense and defense at the same time. But as transportation advocates, our defensive tools are different from those of the status quo defenders we just beat.
When we first push for transportation changes, we are challenging the car-dominated status quo. The status quo, aka “the way things are” is resistant to change that threatens it and welcomes change that supports it. Currently, our status quo is car domination and sprawl. Building a protected bike lane, a bus-only lane, or bulldozing a parking lot to build 100 homes will generate a lot of pushback because it is “different” “not how we do things” or “threatens the neighborhood character.” However, keeping a road car-centric, building new car-centric roads, expanding a highway or bulldozing a greenfield to build a parking lot, generates less pushback. They generate less pushback because it is the system doing what it is designed to do. It is the status quo extending itself. When you don’t like what the status quo is doing and try to incite others to stop it, you will inevitably hear someone say “that’s just how things are.”
The status quo always tries to expand, defend and re-assert itself. We can and do still win changes to that status quo, but until those changes have been accepted into the status quo, we need to actively defend them. We can get a city official to agree to build a speed bump or protected bike lane, but the opposition does not give up once the decision is made. They will keep fighting. When the lane actually gets built and most people are made safer and happier, some of the opposition will calm down. But some will harden. If the change you wanted was poorly executed or designed, you might even get new opposition. People who liked it in theory but don’t like how it turned out in real life.
The status quo has a sort of immune system and it attacks things it perceives as threatening. Whether that is a splinter, a peanut, or a kidney transplant– the status quo will try to reject it. That is, until the change has been accepted into the status quo itself. Eventually, your speed bump, subway, bike lane or bus-lane is just part of “the way things are.” If your change sticks around long enough, the status quo normalizes it. It may even get so accepted as part of the status quo, that the immune system will come to its defense.
That acclimation to the changes we win does happen slowly over time. But there are a few things we can do to make sure our wins stick.
Keep selling the idea
Sprint through the finish line. Even after you win, keep organizing to build support for the change. Win more people over and educate more people about its benefits. Help them acclimate to the change and accept it. Since you’ve won, your original petition is out of date though. You do not need people to keep demanding the change from your decision maker. The change already happened. You need people to show their support in a different way. One way is to host educational events and celebrations about the change.
Protect your allies
You won because some decision maker did a thing you wanted them to do. That’s great. Your opposition is likely going to focus their ire on that decision maker. You credit the decision maker for that change. Your opposition blames the decision maker for that change. If you want to keep your change, you need to have the decision maker’s back. You need to help the general community understand that the change is good and that the decision maker is good for making the change happen. This can be really hard for some transportation advocates because we are used to being angry about the lack of change and we want way more than just one thing changed. The protected bike lane always needs to go a little further, be built a little sooner, and be designed a little better. But there is a seasonality to politics. We cannot always be demanding change. When we get a change that is (at least mostly) to our liking, then we need to say thank you and give praise.
Move the fight to a different front.
Don’t worry though, you can still keep fighting! You just need to shift the front you are pushing on. For example, because of the California High Speed Rail, the regional rail from San Francisco to San Jose recently got electrified. That will allow for the high speed trains and it will also help run the regional trains faster and more frequently. However, an environmental lawsuit a few years back delayed the project by several years and added a few hundred million dollars to its cost. The lawsuit was eventually thrown out. Now, there is an effort to pass a state-law which would exempt all future rail electrification projects from a similar fate. To be fair, I do not know if the original advocates who pushed for the California High Speed Rail tried to then get a similar environmental law reform bill passed years ago. But if train advocates won this new environmental law reform years earlier, we would have saved hundreds of millions on the project. Winning that fight would have required pivoting their political organizing that won the high speed rail ballot prop to then focus on legislative changes. They fought and won in one political battlefield (a state-wide ballot measure), but they did not successfully move their political fight to another one (state legislature). Thus their victory has had a tumultuous time grappling with the status quo. Help your victory stick, by moving the fight to a different arena and winning a new supportive change.
Winning any transportation change is hard. It can be very tempting to coast after you win. But your victory can be undone and it is at its most fragile when it is new. Your victory is not complete until your change has been implemented and then accepted by larger society. Keep going.
Need help winning transportation changes in your community? I’m here to help! Whether you want a 1-on-1 training session or a group workshop, let’s talk. Email me at Carter@carterlavin.com to set something up. Here’s a bit about what training sessions are like.
Free upcoming online events
“How to use cargo bikes to improve your life and how to use them to win protected bike lanes.” With special co-host, “Cargo Bike Momma” Maddy Novich! Learn more and register here. **Sponsored by Flanzig and Flanzig, LLP, New York's Leading Bicycle Crash Attorneys and Bosch eBike Systems.** 4/23/24 @ 5:30pm PT
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Hi! Love your blog. Inspiring and encouraging methods! Well done 👍