Talking Headways Podcast: Fighting to Win

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This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we joined the transportation activist and author Carter Lavin to discuss his new book, "If You Want to Win You’ve Got to Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy." We discuss the mess and practice of politics, how we have more power than we think as advocates, and how to obtain the policies we deserve.

As long-time listeners know, we have three ways to enjoy the podcast. First, you can use the handy player embedded below (or your favorite podcasting app).

Second, you can read an AI-generated transcript of our conversation here.

Third, you can check out the following edited excerpt:

Jeff Wood: I'm interested in this discussion about politics writ large or small-P politics, and the difference between that and what's happened in this country as it pertains to partisan politics and the mess that that is.

Carter Lavin: There's a certain type of person who comes into transit spaces because they like the stuff. They're like, I want this. This makes a lot of sense. This is easy. This is great. But the process of getting it, they find very distasteful. It's like they want the meal, but they hate the cooking.

One thing about transit that I think really appeals to a lot of people is that there is a logic and a clarity and straight lines and things like that. There's a kind of a beauty and logic to it. And then you look at the political process and you think, this is a lot of big feelings and people and egos and who knows what else. This is so scary and a big mess and it makes everything worse and I just want it to all go away.

If we don't accept the fact that this is deeply political — that mess is part of the beautiful thing that we want — we can't get the high speed rail systems that we want just by drawing lines and doing math. We have to do the messy politics. We have to get comfortable with the mess.

There's three things I think about. One is you're doing this already — you are already in the mess. The call is coming from inside the house. Your listeners right now are engaging in a political act by listening to this. This is, as they would say in the political space, like you are being radicalized, you are learning about politics. This is a political act right now.

This is part of our life. This is not something that you opt into in October of an election year. This is all the time. Politics is all the time — which gets us to point two, which is that politics is simply the act of people and society relating to each other.

Partisanship — the really noisy, annoying part, you know, red versus blue, all that — is a small, noisy segment of politics. But everything is politics. Talking to family members at Thanksgiving about how to take the bus is political because you are impacting other people's lives.

And then thirdly: Yes, it might be noisy and seemingly chaotic, but there is a logic to politics that can be figured out. This is an ecosystem. A person might see a jungle or a coral reef or any other ecosystem and think, oh my goodness, I couldn't possibly map this out — except we do. We do this all the time. We say, okay, they're all political beings. They have needs, they have wants, they have things that they're trying to do. They have tools for trying to do it.

I don't care if you think this isn't politics. I don't care if you don't want it to be politics. It is. You should learn to embrace that, or at least begrudgingly accept it — because then you can recognize that the thing you want is really political, that your speed bump requires a political struggle.

The question now is: How do I win a political struggle for a speed bump? You say, I need to get elected officials on my side. I need to get community members on my side. I need to talk to people. I need to do all these things. Here's how I organize it. And that makes it a digestible problem. People see the noise of politics, but I see the energy and passion, the twists and the turns and all that stuff. That's an ecosystem.

There are patterns in that and the patterns are recognizable. If you're the kind of person who listens to a podcast like this and can decipher a Tokyo subway map, you can also decipher American politics. I would say it's slightly less complicated than some of the subway maps.