Your opposition is weaker than you think.
Your opposition is weaker than you think.
Normally I write about how you’re stronger than you might think, today let’s look at the flip side of that
Last week’s post “Picking an ‘easy’ fight as a bike or transit advocate” laid out what makes for a simple target or a favorable battlefield for your transportation advocacy work. As we discussed, the good news is that there are loads of “easy” pro-transit, pro-bike, or pro-walking policy, funding and infrastructure fights you can pick and potentially win. However, no matter what you do, you are almost always guaranteed to encounter some type of opposition.
This week, let’s take a look at assessing the strength of your opposition. Your opposition is weaker than you might expect and figuring out where they are weak and where you could be strong can help you find “easy” fights to win. Also, if anxiety around dealing with potential opposition is keeping you from engaging in more transportation advocacy, hopefully this will help you overcome that– or at the very least help you tell the difference between a powerful opponent and a paper tiger.
Your opposition is not and cannot be everywhere at once. Yes, the car manufacturing and fossil fuel lobbies are powerful and intensely politically engaged…but they aren’t the ones telling your Mayor to reject a protected bike lane or a bus-only lane. Even your local car dealership is very unlikely to engage in a bike or bus lane fight. The main opposition to those sorts of projects will be some local parking defenders and they will try to rally more groups against you. One way to outmaneuver and overwhelm that opposition is to work with allies to pick lots of different fights and different sorts of fights across your community.
You are on the attack, so use that to your advantage. You won’t win everything you push for, but when you have multiple simultaneous campaigns going, you are more likely to win some than if you did them sequentially. That might sound like a lot, but it’s easier to do when you leverage your network of allies against a fragmented opposition.
Your opposition is more fragmented than you might think.
Though your community is car-dominated, it is extremely unlikely that there is a group explicitly pushing for car dominance in your community (let me know if there is!) Understanding that your opposition is fragmented, and not monolithic can help you spot the weak points to go after. For example, the people defending parking on Main Street probably won’t do much to stop you from pushing for a city-wide “slip-lane closure” policy. The people who don’t want a bus-only lane, probably aren’t going to do much to oppose improving bus stop amenities. The anti-government spending folks probably won’t engage to stop the “parking to outdoor dining parklet (which calms traffic)” conversion efforts.
While biking, walking and transit people tend to support better transportation stuff everywhere, the status quo defenders tend to only engage on the stuff they feel directly threatens their specific car use. Wage lots of different types of efforts and you’ll win a lot more. This takes political organizing and coordination on your part, (which, I’m here to help you with) and the good news is that…
Your opposition is less organized than you might think.
Car-dominance is the default among government agencies across the country which means pro-car advocates don’t have to organize to get what they want. And since they don’t have to organize, they don’t really do it. As you have probably experienced, political organizing takes work, so folks don’t do much of it if they’ve already won everything they want. It’s like what the boxing champion Marvelous Marvin Hagler said, “It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5 am when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas.”
So, your opposition has inertia and culture on their side, but that can make them lazy or sloppy. They might fill a “NextDoor” thread with snarky comments, but they are less likely to do the organizing work of circulating petitions offline, meeting with elected officials, building coalitions and all those other organizing actions that build and apply power. Do the actual work of organizing and you’ll win more than expected especially because the opposition will likely not out-organize you. And that’s in part because…
Your opposition is less popular than you might think.
When you advocate for better transit, safe bike infrastructure and making it easy to walk around your community, you are on the side of easy commutes, happy families, healthy communities, vibrant public spaces, accessibility, insulation from gas pump pain, and freedom of movement. Your opposition wants to reject all that just for a few parking spots.
Your opponents are radical cranks. Make it clear to decision makers that your side represents a large and diverse coalition of people across your community– and that your opposition is alone. Be open and real about what the stakes are of the fight you’ve picked– don’t be shy about the scale of the problem you are fixing. Make it clear to people what the sides of the debate are and you’ll see that your opposition is not nearly as popular as you might think.
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Your opposition is likely not a pushover, but they aren’t all powerful. Go out there and pick some political fights to make your community better to walk, roll or ride around and you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve. The opposition isn’t all bark and no bite, but they aren’t nearly as unified, organized, popular, or powerful as you might think. You can do this!
Want help devising a strategy and building the skills in your campaign for 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.
Free upcoming online events!
11/8 @ 5:30pm PT- Free online training “A beginner's guide to getting better bus service in your community." Learn more and register here.
11/30 @ 3:30pm PT — Free online training for bike and transit advocates: “How to Build a Coalition and Win Bigger.” Learn more and register here.
Interested in sponsoring the training of an activist working on an issue you’re passionate about? Let’s chat. Carter@carterlavin.com