How Advocates Redefine What is Possible
And why pessimists are, at best, only half right
This week started off with a bang and it’s so amazing hearing back from friends and other connections about their desire to make positive changes to their communities. Some of the people who have reached out include:
A father looking to slow cars on his street in the East Bay
A person in San Francisco who wants to grow from being a passive supporter of transit to getting more politically engaged & directly lobby their city Supervisor
A lawyer in Los Angeles who wants to fund someone else’s training in SoCal (let me know if you want to be that someone!)
One thing they all have in common is that they want to redefine what is possible. If “the role of the artist is make the revolution irresistible1” the role of the advocate is to make that revolution possible.
Others might say things like “we can’t close that intersection and make a car-free plaza” or “it’s too expensive to build that bike lane” or “we can’t pick a fight with ____, we’ll lose potential allies!” and they might feel comfortable, safe, defeated, or angry with their pessimism. They might even feel haughty or wise in how “correct” their assessment of present reality is and condescend to you about your wanting more. At best they are half right.
Being a successful advocate requires having a realistic understanding of the half they are right about…and knowing the rest of the story. They are (potentially) right about the current situation, but they are dead wrong about the future. They know the costs, but they aren’t seeing the benefits and the path forward.
So “we can’t close that intersection and make a car-free plaza” might be true at that moment, but it’s only a freeze frame of a broader story. The full story is “we can’t close that intersection and make a car-free plaza YET, but after we ________, we can.” or “it’s too expensive to build that bike lane, but we can find the money by ______ and it will be more than worth it because _______” or “we can’t pick a fight with ____, we’ll lose potential allies BUT we’ll gain others and gain _____ (plus they are already picking on us, so we’re just fighting back).” Successful advocates understand that the pessimists may be right about the state of reality at that moment. But advocates use that bit of knowledge as a one of their many many tools to build a new, better reality.
Another world is possible, and you can make it happen.
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Know someone who wants to help make their community easier to bike, bus, or get around? Forward this to them!
How I’m walking the talk these days:
To help defend & expand funding for street improvements like bike lanes, better sidewalks, and crosswalks in Oakland I’ve been petitioning around BART train stations. To help get the word deeper into the community, I recently made a flyer in Spanish about the proposal, went to Fruitvale and had a LOT of great conversations with people there about street safety. Since I was doing it in a specific area, I added the City Councilmember’s office phone number to the flyer to make it easier for people to take action. While I captured fewer email addresses since more people said they would call rather than scan the QR code, it was great expanding the conversation (plus, I got to dust off my Spanish!). You can sign and share the petition here.
(Unsure how to expand your coalition of allies, want to talk through ideas for bridging that gap, or are you nervous about starting conversation with strangers? I get it– it’s an important part of success but it can be very intimidating. Book a training session and I can help you build those skills!)
Upcoming Free Training-- “How to Overcome the Opposition and Win a Bike Lane.” Tuesday February 28th @ 5:30pm PT on Zoom. Register here.
Action/activist of note: The St. Louis Bicycle Lobby just won ~$30M for road safety improvements, ADA compliance, sidewalk repair, and much more– it is the largest investment for safer streets in St. Louis history. WAY TO GO!!! (h/t Kea Wilson of Streetsblog USA)
Meet your fellow transportation advocates at the February Open Discussion Zoom Happy Hour! Thursday February 23rd @ 5:30pm PT on Zoom.
This month’s topic: Organizing riders while on transit -- is it effective, weird, rude, smart, fun? Come share your thoughts, hear from allies, and make some friends. RSVP here to join the conversation on February 23rd.
Correction/lesson learned: I’m much more of a talker than I am a typer and the first version I posted of the other substack piece had more than a few spelling & punctuation errors– fortunately Mara Schechter is (among many things) an amazing editor and helped me fix them. I’m lucky to be married to such an excellent partner and will try not to bug her too often for edits. Happy Valentine’s day.
Culture Corner: I’ve started watching “Cunk on Earth” (h/t Elle) and am loving it. If you like deadpan British humor, you might want to check it out. Let me know what you’re reading and what you’re recommending these days!
Thanks for reading, for forwarding this along, and most importantly– thanks for working to make the world better!
Let’s get moving,
Carter Lavin
Quote from Toni Cade Bambara