There's a big difference between knowing what is best of your city’s transportation system, and knowing how to fight the often fierce political battles you need to win in order to make it real. Fortunately, one author has written a manual to help transit advocates across America do exactly that, from picking campaigns out of the tangle of interlocking transportation challenges that ensnare our cities, to winning over the skeptical — and everything in between.
On this episode of The Brake, we're joined by Carter Lavin’s to discuss his new book, "If You Want to Win, You’ve Got To Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy," which host Kea Wilson called, “The book the transportation reform movement has been waiting for."
The following excerpt has been edited for clarity and length. View a full unedited transcript (with AI typos) here.
Streetsblog: Tell me a little bit about who you are and how you came to be the author of the manual on how to be an effective advocate for transportation.
Carter Lavin: 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 statewide, billion-dollar budget fights to super-local efforts trying to get a bike rack installed in a certain spot.
I wrote "If You Want to Win, You've 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 they're folks who have never gotten politically involved before, who may be even a little intimidated.
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 as possible. Because as climate champion Bill McKibben said his review, this isn't magic; it's work. Politics isn't a mysterious thing that only a special select few can do. We can all do it. And so I wrote the book to help people do it.
Streetsblog: You said that word "politics," which is a word that occurs throughout the book, most prominently in the very first chapter. It's called "Politics isn't a Dirty Word"; 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 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?
Lavin: Politics is happening all around us all the time, whether you like it or not. You are in politics; you're in the news. The news is not some NFL match that you really can't join on the field; you're in it.
And I think for so many people, they are very used to being consumers of [news]; they think 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.
A lot of times when people think about politics, they're thinking about partisan politics; red versus blue, Democrats, Republicans, things like that. Which is a small and very noisy subset of politics — but it's just a subset.
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 — 'big metal go fast' is nice! like trains too! [Laught]
And then there are 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."
I think one thing that's so frustrating for a lot of folks — and especially listeners here, people familiar with the Brake and Streetsblog – is that it doesn't matter that you're right. I talk to advocates across the country, and [those advocates all say], "Yeah, you can be right, and get your butt kicked all the time in politics." Which naturally does engender an extreme dislike of politics for a certain type of person, because they say, "Well, if only it weren't for politics, I'd have everything I want."
Except that's not how reality works. There is no way of removing politics from transportation, because transportation inherently impacts others. So therefore, 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?
Chapter one helps people make peace with this big moment. And the rest of the chapters explain, here's how to do it; 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?
