The importance and power of Political Imagination for transportation activists
Car dominance is a choice. We have other options.
Politics is all about choices. It’s about making choices and how we make those choices. Choices like– does the city redesign a dangerous road to add protected bike lanes? Does a state shift funding away from highway expansion into transit service improvement? Who do we empower to make those sorts of decisions on behalf of our community?
Advocacy is the effort to shift which options are chosen. It’s the work of persuading people to choose this, not that. “Vote for the bus-only lane design”. “Reject the proposal to turn our parks into parking lots.” “Approve the proposal to allow corner stores in residential neighborhoods.”
A powerful way to shift which options are chosen is to shape the options themselves. For example, when the city is considering what to do about a dangerous street are the options “A) maintain status quo vs. B) status quo plus a painted bike lane”? Or is maintaining the status quo not an option and instead the options are just different types of redesigns? Is there an option C?
This is where Political Imagination comes in. The world and our options aren’t binary. We always have more options than what’s being presented. Political Imagination is the ability to see more options and more types of options than the ones that are being presented.
We don’t live in a neutral world or on a blank canvas. We don’t live in a world where all of our options are always laid before us. We live in a world whose systems and visible options have been created by the Political Imagination of countless people. The options we see– the options we are presented with– are the outcome of those systems and the Political Imagination of others.
In the case of the dangerous road, it took Political Imagination to decide to build a road there in the first place, to decide how roads should be designed. to deem that road dangerous, to decide to fix it now, to define the parameters of the options, and to pick which options to make visible.
To be fair, sometimes options aren’t presented due to an honest failure of Political Imagination. For example, your City Councilmember might not understand that a dangerous street could be made safe. Or they could present it as a false choice between “do we make it easier for transit or do we make it easier people on bikes?” because they honestly can’t imagine other options. In the case of well-meaning leaders failing to have Political Imagination, one of the best things you can do is to help them see what the other options are and organize to make those better options more politically feasible.
Political Imagination can be used maliciously to box people in, cut them off from other options or hide those other options from them. It can be used to stack the deck against you so that no matter what choice you make, you lose and they win. California’s Gann Limit and other holdovers from the 1970’s Tax Revolt are excellent examples of choices being cut off in order to force certain types of decisions. In transportation, the baked-in assumption of car dominance cuts off the understanding that there are other options. We can be forced or tricked into choosing bad options if we think we don’t have good options or if we think the only other options are worse.
At its most nefarious, people can feel that their options have been so reduced that violence is the only option.
A particularly insidious way people try to limit your options or force you to pick the option they want is to pretend choices come bundled with other costs. For example, when you push for a protected bike lane that involves removing some parking, people might attack you saying you’ll make it harder for people with disabilities to park.
When boxed in by the machinations of others, the best way out is expanding & applying your own Political Imagination to create and present new options. In the above example about bike lanes, parking and people with disabilities; there is no reason that the bike lane proposal can’t also say that the remaining parking spots shall all be disabled parking-only. Opponents can try to make a good option look bad by saying it’s inherently linked to bad stuff– Political Imagination can help you cut that connection.
People can also try to pretend that bad options aren’t that bad! They can try to make a choice (like widening a freeway) seem easy or good by pretending it does not come bundled with unappealing additional costs (like continued congestion, dirtier air, greater car-reliance). A key to fighting these lipstick-on-a-pig choices is to relentlessly highlight the additional costs baked into them. Flagging those additional bundled costs makes that choice more painful and will help you bring it down.
Fundamentally, painful political choices stem from scarcity or the perception of scarcity. If you want to make a choice more painful, like a proposal to widen a freeway, you need to highlight the scarcity that choice inflicts on the community. The fiscal scarcity the highway boondoggle imposes on your community’s budget or the health scarcity it puts on your air.
The perception of scarcity is largely why anything that impacts parking tends to get people twitchy and why parking-related fights can be so tough. There is only so much room so the question of how to divy it up can get charged. But when confronted with real or perceived scarcity that ties folks into knots, Political Imagination is the machete to cut through it. Parking Benefits Districts, park & rides, e-bike rebates, and other policies to encourage shifts in how people get around are excellent products of Political Imagination that help more people win.
Our communities and world are abundant with natural resources & technological capabilities. Yes, there are physical limits– limits to our climate and to our human health are chief among them. That’s the real scarcity we need to keep in mind. Those limits shape what sort of human ecosystem’s this planet can physically support and our quality of life within them. But how we create communities of joy, justice, health and dignity within those constraints and what those communities look like– the only limit there is our Political Imagination. Imagining it and seeing better options is an essential step to making our neighborhoods and our world better– and of course, once we have that better vision in mind, we need to politically organize to push for it. After all, if you want to win, you gotta fight!
Want help imagining, planning and winning better transit and or safer streets? 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.
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