Long ago during the early days of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, I heard from comms folks that lists were a good way to get media attention to a certain policy or problem within the transportation world. Newspapers loved a good list because the could get people to push back on elected officials when they were ranked really low, or give them kudos when they were ranked really high.

We know that is still the case now as Inrix and the Texas Transportation Institute create lists on congestion and commutes (that often don’t include transit outcomes) that show up what seems like every six months in papers across the country.

Don’t get me wrong I love a good top ten list and enjoy the debate, but that’s all they are meant to do is generate debate. The best city for restaurants isn’t going to be the same for everyone, nor is the city with the best bike infrastructure if it doesn’t exist where you live.

So I’m not asking for folks to give up on “best of” lists because they can be fun, but maybe turn a more critical eye to them when you see one. Look at the underlying data and then think about what the creator of the list is trying to say or accomplish. Or if you want to get some attention to further the movement for active transportation, make your own.

***

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The post Ranking Lists are Nonsense appeared first on The Overhead Wire.

Below are the items we discussed in greater detail:

The first transit system – France Today

LA Metro’s new Care Based Services Division – Los Angeles Sentinel

Ugly buildings and the design shortage – Vox

Mayor Johnson won’t try to buy back parking meters – Chicago Tribune

Denmark’s red lights – Daily Galaxy | Frank Markowitz and Leni Schwendinger’s Lighting Episode 379

Puppies and Butterflies 

Star Wars Maul Trailer

The Pitt is an example of “Competancy Porn” – Washington Post

Many thanks to Bob Nanna for our music.

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The post Mondays 184: The Oldest Transit with Kate Gasparro appeared first on The Overhead Wire.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in the hosting archive.

Featured guests include:

Arizona State Senator Analise Ortiz (Referenced Videos on TikTok and Instagram)

Rochester MN City Council Member Nick Miller

Alice Hilton and Quinn Mulholland Living Streets Lexington

Kai Hall of Greater Greater Washington

Ruth Rosas of Nondrivers Alliance

Listen to Anna speak previously on Episodes 366 & 488

For a full unedited AI generated transcript see below:

Jeff Wood: Joining us today, we have guest host Anna Zivarts. Anna is a visually impaired parent, the lead organizer with the Non Driver’s Alliance, an author of When Driving Isn’t An Option, steering Away From Car Dependency. That’s episode 4 88. For those of you who want to go back into the Talking Headways archives and listen in 2021, launched an experiment.

How can we bring attention to the ways disabled community members who couldn’t drive or couldn’t afford to drive navigated their communities? So Anna invited people who could drive, specifically elected leaders and people who worked for the agencies responsible for our streets, sidewalks, and buses to experience what it was like to get around without driving for a week.

Fast forward five years and the week without driving has grown from a few dozen participants in Washington state. To a challenge with over 600 hosting organizations in all 50 states. In today’s podcast, Anna host a conversation between some of the advocates and elected officials who led a week without driving activities in their communities in 2025.

Listen in.

I’m just gonna read everyone’s bios and then we’ll dive right into the discussion. So first up joining us is Senator Analise Ortiz. Who proudly serves the people of West Phoenix and South Glendale, representing Arizona’s 24th legislative district, she is a born and raised Arizonan, a former investigative journalist and a daughter of educators, Ortiz champions policies to lower rent, come back, corporate, greed, and defend the civil rights of all people.

Next up we have Nick Miller, who was elected in 2024 to Rochester Minnesota’s city Council, where he represents Ward two, a district that covers downtown Mayo Clinic’s Hospital campus, and mixed use neighborhoods to the West. In his first year on council, he has moved forward a study of gaps in Rochester’s Trail Network.

Initiated a council resolution to support restoration of regional passenger rail service in Rochester, and helped. Shape a new policy for the Destination Medical Center Initiative designed for wellbeing. From Lexington, we have Alice Hilton, who cares deeply about streets as a shared public spaces, a founding member of Living Streets Lexington, a new advocacy and community building organization dedicated to co-creating safe, vibrant, and welcoming streets.

Alice enjoys walking, being outside, and riding her bike, especially alongside other people. Also from Lexington. Quinn Mulholland is a safe streets advocate and member of Living Streets Lexington. He has experienced in grassroots advocacy campaigns having previously served as a community organizer for a local nonprofit, in addition to advocating for better transit, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure.

In his personal capacity. He has also works on transportation safety issues as an urban planner for the city of Lexington. With us from Washington DC we have, Kai Hall is Greater, greater Washington DC’s policy manager and the coordinator of the DC Transportation Equity Network raising the outskirts of Tokyo.

Kai is an advocate for transit rider, dignity, and believes people of all ages should be able to get where they need to go safely and conveniently. And last but not least, we have Ruth Rosas who tells stories in English and Spanish about how people move and what freedom of movement means as an advocate for mobility.

Justice Ruth brings over a decade of experience in transportation, public health, youth development, and environmental justice. They believe in reclaiming streets as spaces for connection, care, and liberation. Thanks everyone for joining us. So my first question for you all, and we can go in the order of the intros, if that’s all right, is how did you first get connected to week without driving?

What inspired you to get involved? Senator Ortiz, do you wanna kick us off? Of

Or can’t drive. And many of my constituents on the west side of Phoenix do rely on public transit to get to work. We also have some of the deadliest intersections for pedestrians in the entire county right here in my district. And it’s really important if we’re going to change these things, we need to understand fully where the gaps are.

So that’s why I took on the challenge and I’m really grateful that I did.

A lot of times. I am normally getting around on an e cargo bike, but it was exciting to be able to bring people together, understand the perspectives of who is not served by our transportation network and who on a regular basis is invisible as far as planning. If you’re not able to regularly get around by a car, by your own, or having someone.

Who can give you access. So I’ve gotten more involved every year, and this was the first year I was an elected official and got to participate in the campaign and bring other colleagues on the council and also make it official for our city to participate for the first time.

How did you all get connected?

A lot of our priorities around advocating for policies that reconnect communities that prioritize pedestrians and transit riders and non-drivers in general. So it was a natural fit for us to get plugged in and it’s been incredible to work with Ruth and you, Ana, and it’s connected us to so many more of our local elected leaders and other officials who work on transportation.

Started in Washington state with the Disability Mobility Initiative to really understand how people who cannot drive experience their community and get. People who are in decision making roles and generally the public to understand that because many people are not aware of what those experiences are like.

In 2023, I was with America Walks and we were connected with Anna and we decided to work together to take this nationally. And so a lot of the work that I did there was how do we expand something that started in one area one state to something that was bigger. And we started doing this mostly by our connections and our network at America Walks and expand from there.

So now it is across all 50 states and we’re also internationally in Canada and Australia, and we’ve been contacted by people in many different parts of the world to understand what this is like. So it’s been really exciting to see it expand.

How has this been a tool to move your advocacy forward as an organization? How has that worked for you all?

So after the first two years of us organizing the Week Without Driving campaign we’d reach out to elected officials, whether they’re council members, advisory neighborhood commissioners, or the mayor, and so many of them would say no. Because it would take too long for them to rely on public transit to get to the destinations they need to go to.

And for us this is like one of the main things we’re trying to highlight is even in a place with relatively abundant transportation options, like DC I think we have a number two metro in the country. It is still too difficult to get. To certain parts of the city to get across town to the point where the people in charge of our systems won’t even use them.

And so we. Wanted to give this kind of core frustration, some language that was easily accessible to both members of the public and to decision makers. And that’s how we landed on the transportation time tax, as saying that this is one of the core inequities in our system. It’s how are we prioritizing different people’s time based on the mode that they use.

And so in DC it is still. Trips taken by transit, take on average about two and a half times longer than trips taken by driving, which to us is still unacceptable. So it gives us something to work towards. So that’s one of the main things. The second thing is it raises awareness about a key constituency in DC about.

36% of residents do not own a car. The last time this was counted in 2019, so it’s probably higher now. And yet a majority of our most abundant public spaces are streets are public streets are dedicated to the movement and storage of cars, and so we see that as a huge imbalance. Contributing towards a high transportation time tax.

So it’s given us an ability to highlight this constituency, this non-driving constituency as a group that elected officials should be listening to as well.

Of those, yeah. Those trips that you took into work seemed pretty epic as far as how long they took. What was your experience sharing your week without driving journeys on social media and how did you constituents react? What did you learn? What was that experience like?

I think anyone from other cities who’ve been here recognize that as probably the first thing that’s different about this area is that it is. Very hard to get around without a car. I decided to document this journey because I thought it was very important for people who always drive to find alternative ways to get around the Phoenix Valley, but also to shine a light on the injustice, right?

It really is an injustice when we think about how far people have to travel without a car and how long it takes compared to. Someone who does have the luxury of a car, it took me what is usually a 20 minute drive into downtown Phoenix from the largely Latino neighborhood of Maryvale. It took me two hours on public transit, which typically is a 20 minute drive.

That was because of delays and as I was documenting this and putting it on social media. My comment section was just flooded with people saying The delays are the worst part. The QR codes don’t work, just talking about their different experiences. And then I met people on the way as well who told me what they had gone through.

I met a man who has a visual impairment. He works security late at night and the buses don’t run past a certain hour, so he has to spend a lot of money on Uber and Lyft. To make it home when he has those late night shifts, and that is just not right. When we talk about transportation tax, that’s something that would be included on a transportation time tax is the money you’re spending on things like Uber or Lyft as well.

So it was very eye-opening and I was grateful that people on social media. We’re asking, how can we take action? What can we do to change this? And that’s really what I think this whole campaign should be about is mobilizing people to action.

I really appreciated how much you shared the stories of your constituents who were riding those buses. ’cause this is the daily life experience for many people in all of our communities. And I think that’s so important for elected leaders and the rest of us to connect with. But people aren’t already out there waiting for the.

So I wanna talk about what does it take to make that difference, right? To begin to change our communities, to have non-car driving options work better for all of us. And Alice and Quinn, I wanted to hear a little bit about your experience with Week Without Driving as a coalition building tool for the work you’re trying to do in Lexington.

Do you wanna speak to that? How it’s served as a way to bring people together who wouldn’t normally see that they have a common interest?

That was before I was a part of the group. And organizing that campaign led to the formation of Living Streets, Lexington as an organization. So it really was the reason that we came to exist and having that as a way to build a coalition of other organizations and like we got a lot of really good news coverage and had partnered with a lot of local nonprofits and the library and the senior center and other advocacy organizations.

So it was a really effective way of building out this broad-based coalition like you mentioned. And I would also say I’ve been really inspired by the work that y’all have done, Anna and Ruth, around really like centering this in not just about like people who usually drive going a week and trying out, not driving, but really actually like.

Changing who is at the decision making table. And that was one of the, I think, really powerful things about the challenge in Lexington was that a lot of city council members participated and we got a lot of really great feedback from them about like how eye-opening it was to rely on the bus system to go about their day-to-day lives.

’cause a lot of them don’t often ride the bus.

I actually had the mayor and our city council president take me up on it. I saw our council president at several public events that week showing up on his bike and the mayor at least once with a walk to school day that we did in partnership with our public school system. But I think it’s been the conversations that I’ve taken after week without driving with other elected officials who didn’t participate that have been most eye-opening.

For example, with the walk to school day, it happens at one of our schools along the southeast side of town, which is adjacent to a county road, which is designed much like an urban highway. Through that neighborhood, the roadway separates a mobile home park from the school that’s their neighborhood school.

And when I was walking along the side of the mobile home park. No one joined me. All of the kids that were participating in Walk to School Day had been bused over to a public park and were walking along the path, but nobody from the neighborhood on my side was joining just organically. And so as I’ve talked with my colleagues at Olmsted County, I’ve told them that many roads in our city are county jurisdiction or state jurisdiction.

Our county does not have an adopted Complete Streets policy, and I’ve been able to educate them on what that would do and how it’s a safety and a pro human development measure that they often talk about their services as not so much infrastructure, but provision of human services and tying the human health element into infrastructure has been a productive conversation.

We’re not there yet, but we’re in the process of adopting a safety action plan funded by Safe Streets and Roads for all. And that’s one of the key recommendations that I continue to ask that comes out is the recommendation for Complete Streets policy in the jurisdictions within our MPO service area.

We’re about a third of the US population and higher percentages in low income communities, right? Some rural communities as well as urban communities, and we often are not considered as essential community members who need to go places. And I think one place that we see that is when we’re thinking about planning for how people get to medical care, how people get to school, right?

How people get to work. But I wanna ask specifically, Nick, in the context of Rochester, around your work. With access to medical care. ’cause I think that’s something that when planners are thinking about how people are gonna be able to get to those doctor’s appointments, they’re not considering that.

Not everyone can drive themselves there. Do you wanna speak to the work you’re doing around healthcare access?

And I think as Mayo Clinic has access points in rural areas as well, those tend to be primary care and not specialty services. My wife is actually an eye physician and treats patients for a variety of conditions, including those that are causing visual decline and require regular treatment, and her clinic is only accessible in Rochester, so she has patients who are forced to either find a family member or pay for transportation, or many times drive themselves.

Unsafe to access their medical care. And this is a conversation she has with many of her patients who have very limited vision and she will ask them to start the conversation, not have you considered not driving, but when did you stop driving? And often the response is I drove today. And it’s a difficult conversation to then explain that they don’t meet the requirements to drive.

And will lose access. Also, just tell the story about many people in our community choose to move to Rochester to be closer to their medical care. I have many aging neighbors and just last week, one of my neighbors accidentally pressed their gas instead of the brake as they were accessing their driveway, and they hit a mature tree in the front of our yard and I was called to come back home and he was taken away by ambulance.

It’s fortunately going to recover, but it’s just a constant reminder of how poorly our transportation system serves the needs of people who live in our communities.

Does anyone else have an example of that?

That is thanks in large part to good land use decisions and also relatively abundant access to transit. But there are still gaps in DC’s relatively unique compared to the rest of the country in that we do have good options, but there are still gaps, whether it’s in the sidewalk network, like we’ve had folks highlight how sometimes the sidewalk will just stop.

And then it’s a road. Or more often than not, it’s the fact that many of our sidewalks are not a DA compliant, and so if you are using some sort of mobility device, you may not be able to access the street or the curb safely. There’s also folks who highlighted the lack of bus shelters and how in my area, especially like the densest part of dc, we also have the highest rates of the urban heat island effect, but.

We don’t have as many shelters as the wealthier temperature wise, coolest part of dc. And so we had folks highlight some of those disparities as they went about their day. Things that you might not notice unless it really affects you but everyone benefits from accessible sidewalks, accessible bus stops having a place to rest while you wait for the bus.

A sheltered place to wait for the bus.

And we were meeting a hotel house cleaner out at her home somewhere in the outskirts of DC and rode the bus together with candidate Bowser and then transferred to the metro. Still back in the day where you had to pay twice, there wasn’t a free transfer. And I remember this housekeeper was talking about what a financial penalty that was for her and how difficult it was to have to pay that extra bit because she couldn’t afford to live in a more central area in the city.

Where she could ride the metro without taking a bus first. And that conversation with Candidate Bowser really made me reflect and when it came to thinking about how do we highlight these stories of non-drivers, that’s really where the idea started. So thanks DC for helping us with that. I think that housing piece is something that we think about a lot.

Around like who has access, right? Those of us who can’t drive or can’t afford to drive, many of us would love to live in areas with great transit near the places where we work or go to school often. That’s where housing is a premium. And so we’re forced further out into areas with less sidewalks, less connectivity, less transit options.

Is that something that happens in the Phoenix area? Senator Ortiz?

We’re actually shot down by voters and you’ll see that the arguments against the light rail extending are almost always rooted in racism and classism. And we actually are still having to fight to extend the light rail into my neighborhood here in Maryvale. We’re having a council meeting on it in a couple of days, and so it’s very frustrating and when we think about.

Where housing is built, we absolutely need to be building denser along public transit corridors. The two things go hand in hand and we continue to see pushback on the development of affordable housing or dense housing, near transit corridors for the few transit systems that we do have, like our light rail.

So we really do need to do a better job, I think, as a movement of. Explaining how these two issues are inextricably linked and how we all deserve a place to live that we can afford while also being able to get to work or our friend’s house or church or the hospital, or whatever it might be, through the method of transportation that is best for us and for our families.

And yeah, I feel like the bus system often gets left out of conversations, or at least the conversations that we were all kind of privy to. And I feel like we, without driving really. Helped us bridge that gap and start building a relationship with leaders in our transit agency and with bus riders and, ’cause I guess Lex Tran Lexington is like any other city where the bus system works really well for some people.

If you’re a University of Kentucky student, then it’s great and you can rely on it and it’s dependable and fast and frequent. Then obviously for other folks who also rely on it, it doesn’t work as well. And so I think it was just a really good container to try and talk about all of these different pieces at once and in relation to each other.

And because we did the Week Without Driving campaign in 2024, we built some really solid relationships with transit agency leadership, and now we’re able to use that to get an American Public Transit Association grant to do a transit advocacy academy. Are really trying to work to build up a cohort of Lian residents who I think to Senator Ortiz’s point are thinking about the relationship between housing and growth and transit.

And it’s a pilot project and we’re packing a lot into four sessions, but we’re gonna see where it goes.

And I think a lot of times. There is a lot of importance to getting people to see the limitations of transit and how hard it can be to rely on it. But also I think there’s something to be said for uplifting that transit is an amazing resource and can be a really great and wonderful and social experience.

And it’s truly like a melting pot of all different types of people and just celebrating the bus as something that is not only essential, but also can be a fun experience for people was also important.

I know that we don’t always hear about everything that happens. We try to follow things with the hashtag on social media. That’s week without driving, and ask for folks to report those to us. But there’s always new things that we’re learning about because it is a very diffuse and grassroots movement. Ruth, do you wanna share a few of your favorite activities?

Has that ever occurred that you’d like to highlight?

Also, round tables. One of the big things about week without Driving is that we are obviously very passionate about making sure that people with disabilities are included in these different activities that people do, and. People with disabilities are often excluded because people don’t know how to include them or don’t know the accessibility needs.

And so people have done round table discussions and making sure that elected officials hear from their constituents. People have done meetups or after work gatherings. One of the really cool things that people did this year was build bus benches, which was amazing because they got to do really interesting and creative paint.

Around them and it was amazing to see that people were able to use this bus bench as a way to highlight that many places don’t actually have the things that people need, which is shelter and a place to actually wait for the bus. As we heard throughout this conversation. Many times people are not actually waiting the time that maybe your abcess, you’re waiting a lot longer, or maybe there’s ghost buses, and so we really need to make sure that those people have accommodations because there’s a lot of people with disabilities who don’t have that access.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think it’s just amazing to see what people have done. A lot of the amazing things that I have seen is the bus ride-alongs because they try to get their mayors or elected officials to go with them, and many elected officials have never done that before. And so it’s a way to incentivize people to see that their mayor or their elected official, their city council member is actually also trying to understand their lived reality.

And so a lot of these really amazing activities are incentivizing storytelling. One of the big things that we have seen is uplifting the stories of involuntary non-drivers, the stories that we don’t normally hear, whether it be people that are low income or people with disabilities, or. Even children included.

I talk about this a lot because this is a big thing that in my personal life is really important. We often see people not including children in these stories, and I talk about how I had to walk to school. It was over a mile and I had to walk with my little sister. And I was very young and so was my sister and I live in northern Illinois.

And it used to snow a lot and it was very cold. And I think that often we exclude children from these conversations. And so highlighting those. Personal stories are really important. We’ve seen young people be included in these conversations, which sometimes is the first time that we hear about this, especially in certain communities, in rural communities.

And so I think that the storytelling aspect of this is really important. And so what has come out of week without driving is that we’re shifting the narrative around non-drivers, and we’re shifting the narrative about. Who is being talked about. And the amazing thing is that there’s a lot of content and so I definitely urge and encourage people, if you wanna see how weak without driving has happened in your community or your state, look it up because there’s probably something that’s been highlighted.

And so please do so on Instagram or TikTok. And we’re hoping to do that a lot more in the upcoming year so that people can see all these stories that are being told.

So October 1st through eighth is what we’re leaning towards for 2026 as our official week without driving. Dates. We’ll be doing national organizing support starting in February with our national kickoff, and invite anybody who’s interested, both in the US or anywhere in the world really to join those webinars and learn more.

I wanna hear a little bit about what you all are thinking as organizers and your communities as elected officials. What would your hopes be for next year, for week, without driving? Is there anything you’d like to try? Anyone you’d like to try to invite to participate? Any sort of fun activities you’d like to try to organize?

Maybe jumping on the bus or the light rail from restaurant to restaurant, get different snacks, try different food, and then have a conversation at the end about the policies that we can change to together.

We’ve seen transit Bingo cards. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. And it hasn’t happened for a week without driving yet. I’ve been trying to get an agency to help me do this, but a a wheels on the bus ride along where you’re singing and storytelling for kids, riding the bus and ultimately going through a bus wash.

That’s the goal. Haven’t got it to happen yet for a week without driving, but. My Lexington friends. Any ideas that you’re thinking about or, I know we’re still early in the planning for 2026, but anything you’d like to aspire to for next year?

And I think one of the interesting things about 2026 is that it is an election year and there will be candidates out making the case for why they should be representing different parts of our city. I am encouraged that those are new audience members, both for participating in week without driving, feeling a special pressure perhaps to understand how our communities and our city services are working and go out and try those and publicize their experience as candidates and also perhaps.

Add some additional weight to the invitation to my colleagues on the council today who have not participated yet. So I think 2076 is a huge opportunity to grow. Who is participating and who is talking about the week without driving?

I’m too busy to do this. I can’t, I don’t have time to ride the bus. Or I couldn’t possibly take transit. Or walk or bike to this thing that I need to do as a candidate. And I think it, it really does raise some important issues of how does anyone who doesn’t have access to driving potentially ever run for office then, or serve as an elected official if we’re acquiring them to basically be able to drive or afford a driver.

And I think while it is challenging to try to do week without driving. While you’re campaigning in most parts of this country, I do think it’s an important thing to consider because if we have these requirements around, or expectations around what it means to be an elected official that require a driver’s license that’s really limiting to a lot of folks.

So

I think we should be actively trying to earn the votes of everyone in our community and understanding their needs and making sure that representation at the local policy making level is addressing those daily needs. And I think public transit is a huge need, or at least transportation more generally.

We would not be able to do our daily lives without good access to transportation.

Super encouraging next year, election year. I think it’s a huge opportunity to educate candidates, especially in dc The mayor has a huge role to play in how transportation projects are built or not built. And hearing your story on of how Week Without Driving came to be with then candidate Muriel Bowser and now you know, her three terms in and seeing how she’s evolved.

I’m hoping we can get her on the bus with us to talk about these issues. I’m hoping we’ll get candidates on the bus. Ultimately, like going back to Ruth’s point. This is about narrative change and so I think for us, we’re really trying to use the transportation time tax as one way to tell a story about what is one of the core issues with our system, even though we have a pretty good system relative to most other places.

Time, how we value people’s time and all the infrastructure choices we make to affect that. It all matters. And building out partnerships. The time tax concept came about with partnership with DC Transportation Equity Network members, and I really look forward to continuing to work with our residents to build this out.

We launched a new webpage that we called our accountability tracker. Basically, it showed all of our list of elected and appointed officials who have some sort of role to play in our transportation systems, and we showed their pictures and we showed who we invited. We had that all in one tab. Then they were all in gray scale, and as they committed to the campaign, we shifted them over to what we call the champions tab, where their picture would be in full color.

And so we would keep pushing this saying these are champions. It was somewhat of a shaming tool, which I think is effective, especially for elected officials who stubbornly say no. If we can show them that there are. This is like relatively minor, but if there are consequences to saying no, choosing not to opt in to highlight the experiences of this big constituency, I don’t know how else you’ll get movement.

So we were really excited to launch that new tool and honestly, the, one of the biggest things that made a difference was to Senator Ortiz and Council Member Miller’s experiences having. Existing public officials take initiative without even the advocates needing to ask. That makes such a difference.

And honestly, like that was a huge part of our success this year. The CEO of WADA was already on it. We had various agency heads here, reach out. They’re like, when are you gonna do it? So that was a huge part of it.

I feel like that opens up a whole opportunity to work with some of our emerging bike buses and talk about the school pick up and drop offline, and how awful that it’s for everyone involved. And then also we’ve had some conversations with high schoolers who are interested in learning how to ride the bus.

I’m excited. I did not know those were the dates, so I’m thrilled. Quinn, I don’t know if you’d add anything to that.

So yeah, I’m really excited.

We’re lucky in Washington State that we do have fair free transit for everyone under 18. So makes it a little easier to get some folks access who wouldn’t otherwise have it. Is there anyone else who wants to share any experiences, thoughts, takeaways around week without driving before we wrap this up?

It’s been really empowering and so I am just really grateful to you, Anna and Ruth, for organizing this.

And right now, unfortunately, too many of our transportation systems are set up just to be able to do that in a car. But that’s a choice and it’s. It’s not a choice that has to be the way that it is forever in the future if we start to organize alternatives. So thank you all for joining. If you are interested in learning more about Week Without Driving, it’s week without driving, dot org is the website.

We welcome you again to join our monthly webinars to start to organize with us as we prepare for the 2026 week without driving events in October.

Copyright © 2026 The Overhead Wire

The post (Unedited) Podcast Transcript 563: Week Without Driving appeared first on The Overhead Wire.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript so there are some messy parts.  But it’s mostly good…

Jake Berman: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

The particular freeway to blame is the 1 0 1 through Hollywood in Los Angeles. And I had been stuck behind a guy in a Jeep for roughly half an hour. The kind of fellow with too many bumper stickers. And I was just thinking to myself, my commute is five miles. What am I doing with my life? Why am I stuck behind this city in a traffic jam that hasn’t moved for half an hour?

So I went to the library. And I started doing research on what happened to LA’s once, vaunted Public Transit network. And as it turned out, it wasn’t just LA that had this kind of collapse of the public transit network, it was all across North America. And one thing led to another and I started making maps of both the vanished public transit networks and what could have been, had the politics come out a different way.

I just find that fascinating that. You had a different way of thinking about things and process for going about thinking like why did this happen versus like the other direction that you could have gone which is evil megalomaniac. But

Madrid to Seville faster than you can go to the airport, get on a plane, go from Madrid to Seville, and then get to the city center from the airport. Like it was very well known to me that public infrastructure for public transport is far better abroad than it is in the states. So I was thinking to myself stuck in the freeway, Spain is a much poorer country than.

United States, right? Like my counterparts in my day job who do the exact same job, make a third or half of what I make. And yet it’s much easier to get around Spain without a car than the United States. And that’s really what led me down this road in the first place. The transport problem is not something that can or should really be solved with technological innovation.

We should be ripping off the best ideas from other places. We should be imitating them, not innovating.

That was like what led me into this whole thing. But was it just the sitting in traffic or was it something it was already inside of you from when you were younger? I did play way too much Sim City when I was a kid.

It was a birthday gift from I think one of my family friends, and then Sim City 2000, and it’s been like that ever since.

You would never expect places like say Detroit. Atlanta and Los Angeles to have parallel trajectories with anything, right? LA is the quintessential suburban city. It’s as California as you get. Atlanta is the capital of the South. Detroit is a Midwestern industrial town, and yet. When it comes to the transport question, so much of what got built and what didn’t get built was based on the race question.

And there, it wasn’t really a race question, but I went and looked at all these histories of these different networks like you did. And what I found was. I actually dug into the reports that were housed at Princeton, the Office of Technology Assessment. And they had done like these community planning reports for all of these systems that were being planned in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.

So you looked at Detroit, you looked at Atlanta, and I think the one that surprised me the most, and maybe just ’cause I was in college and I didn’t know any better from a planning perspective, but Atlanta and the impact of the race discussion was so thick and so deep that it made me think about all these other places.

Your book brought that up again, which is like how many of these places, the transportation that we have now is a result of the race question.

The fear through most of the post-war era was that black people would get on the train, take the train to Beverly Hills, steal people’s televisions, and then speedily escape. On the subway, which the whole concept is ridiculous if you think of just how big TVs were back in the day and that yes, they sold cars to black people as well, but it really couldn’t be decoupled from that fear of public transport equals desegregation.

One of the reasons that Marta finally passed after several referenda is that the MARTA system got black buy-in. Many of the East West lines routing decisions were changed from the original plans to better serve black neighborhoods.

They had the same suburban boom after the war, but they never decided to demolish their city centers in order to build those freeways. And that’s really the reason that public transport works so much better in Canada than it does south of the border.

So they didn’t build them through the center of the cities. We’ve talked about this a number of times on the show recently, but Megan Kimball’s book is really illustrative of the discussion that Eisenhower had with some of his advisors at the time that they were talking about why a lot of the highways were going through American cities.

And he was actually advised against it, and she went into the archives and found these discussions and notes from the thoughts that he had. People, the advisors around him that said, Hey, you need to build transit to get people between places. The cities are too dense for running a highway through. And the interesting part too was when this was going on, Nixon was on the ballot against Kennedy and so he didn’t wanna mess up his parties fortunes and obviously they lost to Kennedy. But it was interesting to see how politics played into that too. And I imagine that is a discussion and that goes throughout the discussions that you have in the book.

And it does.

And lest we get too romantic about neighborhoods that were demolished. My mother-in-law was a child at the time that she moved into one of these big X shaped towers that were built in New York City to replace tenements in Manhattan. And her parents had gotten a two bedroom apartment that’s a thousand square feet.

And she started crying because she thought that the entire floor would be coming into the apartment to use the bathroom because that’s how overcrowded these tenement buildings were. So it is useful to have that as a corrective because people really like living in city centers now. But at the time, it was associated with a specific type of urban poor.

And especially minority poor, whether it’s Filipinos in Echo Park, Los Angeles, or Jews in Boyle Heights of LA on the other side of downtown.

The Market Street Railway in San Francisco, the Detroit United Railway in Detroit were really treated as public enemy number one during the interwar period. Much the same way that the tech oligarchs have. Very few friends in the public eye these days. The railway and transit oligarchs of a century ago also had very few friends because if you think about it, you know the year is 1920.

And the automobile hasn’t really gone mainstream just yet. So if you wanna get around a city, your options are to walk, find somebody with a horse or pay the fair of the much hated transit monopoly. So in some sense, people like Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler. Represented a going away from these private monopolies that dominated the regions.

So in Seattle, for instance, the Streetcar monopoly was also the electric company. Same thing in Atlanta, where Georgia Power, which is still the electric monopoly, ran the trains in other cities. The Street Streetcar Monopoly was deeply tied with something else like in Oakland, across the bridge from San Francisco.

The owner was. Something called the Realty Syndicate. They built hotels and suburban subdivisions, and that’s how they made their real money. They had very few friends as a result because they dominated so much of the metropolitan areas. And as part of this reaction, a lot of the country just decided to throw the baby out with the bath water.

If you are in. New York or San Francisco cities decided to open up their own transit companies to compete with the much hated monopolies and put them outta business. If you go to Seattle or Detroit, the city just bought the thing outright and nationalized it. And in other places like Los Angeles or New Orleans, the public’s decision was to grin and bear it.

Like when Uber first came to New York City. It was a revelation because you could get where you wanted to go. Like New York City, famously yellow cabs would not go to Brooklyn if you hail a cab, you would have to go through a whole dog and pony show in order to convince a cabby to go over the bridge, or you’d have to call.

A kind of sketchy car service and haggle with the driver to get over the bridge. Whereas Uber says, great, you put it into your phone, you say, I wanna go to Brooklyn. No mess, no fuss. You know what the fair is and you call it a day. And. It’s somewhat similar with the introduction of the automobile and for that matter, the bus where you weren’t reliant on, say, the Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles a century ago because there was a competitor, a publicly owned bus service owned by the city of Santa Monica, which is now the big blue bus.

Or alternatively you could drive, you weren’t at the mercy of the Pacific Electric and you didn’t have to spend your money propping up this corrupt monopoly.

Because of this people were saving all of their resources. But it never really was something where these streetcar companies made a ton of money. They were combined with the electric company, they were combined with the real estate development. They were combined with a lot of stuff. And so it was thinking about it as a public service and that’s in the end why a lot of these cities purchased the rights or the properties of these systems.

But I find that fascinating as well, is that like we. Look back and think about, oh, the days of the streetcar and the streetcar suburb and the neighborhoods that existed, or ownership is how we should do this, and it should be run like a business. Which is a silly way of thinking about it. But I find that fascinating too, that these companies never really were on top of it.

And the Twin Cities example specifically was interesting because the people that wanted a profit just basically ruined it.

They stop every couple of blocks they run in mixed traffic. They’re not really a service improvement on a bus to make at grade rail work, you have to run it in its own lanes. You have to run long trains. You have to do. Basically what looks like light rail as opposed to the street cars in like the F market in San Francisco, which stops every couple of blocks.

So maybe I’m a little jaded in that perspective.

A street car. No. As opposed to like you could do it just as well with bendy buses, but even though SF chose to build that as a tourist attraction.

It was a great idea. Don’t get me wrong, especially as part of the urban revitalization that I grew up with, because I’m originally from sf, like things were a lot more. Sketch before the Embarcadero freeway was torn down before things really started getting cleaned up in the nineties. But at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily require rail to do that.

And for various reasons, Philly ended up using Streetcar for the bulk of their in city lines, and most of those lines that really should have been upgraded to carry some sort of subway surface route, like the ones that run to West Philly just never were.

With New York and Chicago for being one of the big three American cities. Philadelphia really does have that sort of legacy where they were, I think number four, number five, well into the 20th century, but for various reasons, they ended up getting lapped by DC and New York, and they don’t necessarily get treated as in the same league as DC and New York.

And. I’m not sure whether that’s because they just happen to be smaller than the DMV slash the tri-state area, or it’s because Philadelphia is between DC and New York, whereas Boston on the other hand has a very different personality. They don’t get overlooked nearly as much by, say, the national press in a way that Philly Philly sometimes gets skipped if the analogy holds.

I’ve been watching The American Revolution by Ken Burns and all these cities on the east coast get talked about and. What’s fascinating now is to see how important they were then versus how important they are now. And then also listening to colleagues talk about places like Baltimore where there’s a lot of folks who live in Baltimore and they’re talking about housing prices, et cetera, around the country, and they might not have the same perspective, and so they feel overlooked when we start talking about superstar cities and the housing crisis and things like that.

And it’s a little bit different in some of these other cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore. So I find that discussion interesting when we focus on these. Few cities. There’s others that could use a little bit of attention as well.

They did end up in some kind of post-industrial decline the way that say Buffalo or Detroit did in a way that didn’t really hit, say Boston or dc. Boston was never a major industrial center to begin with. Boston really peaked in the 1920s, and its population was largely stagnant and then began declining after the war.

Whereas Philadelphia and Baltimore hit their maximum population around 1950 if memory serves, and their decline was tied very deeply with the post-industrial era. And Boston, unlike those two, had that massive educational cluster, that massive hospital cluster, that as it turns out. Became a really big deal when the economy became centered around things like healthcare and high tech.

Like Philly has Penn and Temple and Baltimore as Hopkins, but it’s nothing like the cluster of Mass General Harvard bu, Boston College. MIT and all of the rest of the educational institutions in Greater Boston. So it’s not unfair to say that Boston is the world’s largest college town in a way that Philly and Baltimore use Penn and Hopkins as major economic engines, but they’re just one among many.

Yeah.

That’s fine. Like it would’ve been a mistake, for instance, to build out the Cleveland downtown. People mover the thing only ran in one direction. It didn’t serve a lot of the major destinations, and it would’ve been a wide elephant in a way that the Detroit people mover. Is a white elephant. It’s like it’s a cool thing to get on and ride around downtown Detroit, like it’s the Disneyland monorail, but it’s not a useful piece of transport infrastructure, and that’s very much in contrast to a place like Seattle say, where shooting down a full-blown subway network.

In the sixties and seventies was a major mistake because Seattle is well suited for public transit, and if they had received something like Bart or the Washington Metro 40 years before they actually built the link light rail, that would’ve greatly influenced the trajectory of Seattle. But Seattle in the 1970s was.

In deep trouble because of Boeing being in deep financial trouble, and it hadn’t really become the fashionable tech hub that it would ultimately become because of Amazon and Microsoft and the like. Yeah, it’s just fascinating ’cause I know that there’s a lot of times in history and even here in the Bay Area where you voted for something or something I voted for, and it never happened.

And that never really paid off. But it is a fascinating thing to think of. Had the Bay Area decided to merge together instead of becoming I think it’s 101 municipalities, theoretically, making up one metropolitan area.

Stuff. It’s funny when people talk about the transit agencies as well if you talk about regional connections, you could make, there’s always a discussion about whether one of the agencies is gonna get short shrift because transit in San Francisco is gonna get more resources than say, AC Transit or down in, in San Jose.

And so it’s interesting we’re still having that discussion because we’re gonna have that sales tax and the folks down in the southern end of the region weren’t quite sure if they were gonna sign on because they didn’t want to get short shrift of the money that might come from the funding that might happen if we pass the measure.

So it’s interesting to see those discussions. They start then and they continue feels like forever and endlessly.

Like the classical way to do it is just to create one agency. And merge all the others in, which is what they did in the past. But there’s actually something I find fascinating in the German speaking lands called the Fair Cares Bond, where there’s a regional governance board that sets Faires and controls the ticketing and coordinates the scheduling between different agencies so that you can have a free transfer between say, the Slovak railways to Broads lava, and the subway within the city of Vienna.

But. It doesn’t necessarily require one giant agency to run everything like say the New York MTA. You just need to have a coordination body that makes sure that everyone gets along.

The other thing is the Great Depression, right? And that impacted a lot of places as well. Just folks that were impacted, whether that was the money or the politics or whatever else, the change in the streetcar companies, et cetera. That was another fascinating turning point.

There could have been a major public infrastructure push to say, we’re not going to abandon all of these trolley lines. We’re gonna upgrade them and make them work, where the public just didn’t buy it. The public had no patience for that kind of thing. There was a city council vote in Los Angeles in 1948 where the Pacific Electric offered to sell the remnants of the system, which was still extremely extensive.

To the city of Los Angeles and the city would run all of the remaining lines upgraded with a subway through downtown, which would look an awful lot like modern light rail.

Right?

Or feel that way anyways.

And to us, a ratio of one car per four people is surprisingly low. That’s that’s the rate of car ownership that they have in Manhattan today. At the time that was considered the wave of the future.

My favorite city that I unexpectedly enjoyed was Cincinnati. Cincinnati is not a city that I thought would be on my list of, oh, this place is surprisingly cool. Like I would totally go back there because I spent time in each city doing the research over quarantine after I got my vaccine. And so I had a lot of time to just wander around and take in the.

Aura of all of these places. Cincinnati, I liked much more than I expected. Houston, I liked much more than I expected.

It’s not that it’s an honest to God city and their land use policy is remarkably good considering that the city was built out for the most part after the Second World War. Yeah. Just as a place that feels effortlessly cool and doesn’t try to front unlike say Dallas, where I did not particularly enjoy it, and the vibe of Dallas was much more a place that’s trying to chase.

Los Angeles or New York or whatever it is, it’s trying to follow whatever the cool trends are as opposed to Houston, where Houston is quite happy being Houston.

Oh yeah. It’s gross. So hot. Was so hot all the time when I was living there. Yeah, it’s fascinating like that you gravitated towards Cincinnati because it had, it was that great depression story. And the subway that they built but never used. And there’s still talk about it whether we, they should use that piece of infrastructure that they built so long ago.

The M 25 in London runs around the center of London. Nobody’s decided in London that it would be a good idea to run a freeway in front of Westminster Abbey. Like it’s just, it’s not a thing that. They should be doing. And in American cities, they said, yeah of course. It’s a great idea.

Let’s build a freeway down the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Or let’s build I 10 right through the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans. They just, they thought it was a good idea at the time because it was it was the wave of the future and. It was a way to get rid of poor people, minorities and poor minorities.

The powers that be of those cities are deeply invested in real estate locally in a way that in a lot of other places it just made sense to decamp for the burbs.

By and large, a lot of the public input and bureaucracy that characterizes modern American planning is not particularly useful for anything or anybody. It’s a sort of kabuki theater where the same three cranks claiming to speak for the people, show up and say, no, we couldn’t possibly have bus lanes on Geary Boulevard, for instance.

Yep. And this is not the actual will of the people because the people already had a say in this when they had an election. There. There is no better way to have a community consultation than to just have an election, and politicians should be able to enact their agendas. Like it shouldn’t have to require a million years to build, say, the Chinatown Subway or the second Avenue subway or the Wilshire Boulevard subway.

Because these are things that the public decided to tax themselves for. They elected politicians to get this stuff done. Yes, the politicians should be able to get stuff done as opposed to getting bogged down in the details with this type of endless procedure that goes nowhere. Yep.

I think that I often think about that the representatives that we elect and whether they are able to move forward things. Stuff here in San Francisco specifically about the Great Highway and sunset Dunes, the new park, and the recall of Joel and Gar.

He. Actually saw what the results of the election was, which is the whole city of San Francisco said, we wanna have this park. And so it happened. And so I think there’s a lot of people that just don’t like the results of elections, and so they’ll push back on that. But it’s also frustrating that we can’t just build a lot of these systems that we really want.

The other frustrating thing is that in the United States specifically we talk about this all the time, but if we’re gonna have votes on transit. Systems like these, why don’t we have votes on the highways and roads? Like why did we ever allow the state dots to be the ones that are the arbiters of picking where the roots were?

We decided that was something that we wanted and so nobody’s really pushed back on it. And so it’s interesting, look at it from that juxtaposition of we vote for transit systems, we don’t vote for roads.

Predate like the reconstruction of transit in the US and congestion is not really a political issue in the sense of left versus right in the states. There’s, there are questions of how do we deal with congestion, but it hasn’t really become politicized in the way that like if you wanna build a subway in Los Angeles, then black people will come to Beverly Hills and steal your television.

Like highways never got politicized in that sort of way, and I suspect it’s because so much of the experience of people’s daily lives is spent in a car.

They didn’t have to vote for that. That tore out whole neighborhoods already. There’s gonna be one that they’re trying to build at the state to run through a place that’s gonna be inundated with floodwaters in a number of years. You mean Route

I’m frustrated less with putting highways up for vote and more with having to put systems up to vote when that doesn’t have to happen for these road systems that we built their infrastructure. Projects, they were done by state dots and state dots now have this infrastructure where they can go and do a lot of stuff.

California has speed rails taking forever. I sometimes wonder if we just gave it to the state DOT and said, build a road there. They would’ve had it done by now. Yeah. Although I think this is a California specific problem as well, because in the Northeast, these types of referendums just don’t happen.

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The post (Unedited) Podcast Transcript 562: The Lost Subways of North America appeared first on The Overhead Wire.

This was also an exploitation of not just people’s wallets and desperate drivers, but our built environment. Uber and ride hailing generally doesn’t work in the suburbs or hold the same value proposition it does in denser urban environments. Despite their cries to the contrary, that they were friends all along, they’ve also damaged transit and clogged cities by taking up precious street space and promising convenience that’s stolen from others.

Thus Uber has set up our transportation system as a mostly uncontested space for players working towards the autonomous future to dominate. We also allow this by continuing to suffocate the alternative by catering to single occupancy vehicles rather than investing in speed improvements and service for transit that could easily service many of these trips.

We need more investments in transit service and frankly in speed. A huge discussion erupted last month when the Finch LRT in Toronto was beaten end to end by a runner. For most elite runners it wouldn’t be too hard to beat a bus on a route with frequent stops when their training runs are 10mph easy. In 2024, New York buses ran at an average speed of 8.17 mph citywide. But if we’re making new investments and spending that much money, we should expect to beat good runners easily on time.

With more frequent and faster transit, as T4 dreams about in a new moonshot report, we could create a safer and healthier environment.

There will always be cars and a need for them, but cities with limited space shouldn’t be exploited by those who would be monopolists. They don’t really care about the greater good, and people should be able to get where they want to go safely without paying through the nose for it.

People have been talking about affordability but as Scott Bernstein reminds me, we used to only pay ~3% of our income to transportation. Now many are forced to pay around 17%. It all starts and ends with our built environment, and how we get around in it.

***

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Below you’ll find links to the items we discuss during the show…

Closing labor force gap – Los Angeles Times

Congestion pricing air pollution – Phys.org

Congestion pricing benefits – NYT

Leaving DART is hard – D Magazine

Paris cable car – Metro

Speed matters – Italian (urban) letters

Quiet sells – Wall Street Journal

Road salt remains – WHYY

California speeding penalties – Los Angeles Times

Pusing green can backfire – Grist

Misinformation – Volts

Bonus Items

Carmakers and operators liable in China – Cleantechnica

Euro cities clamp down on big cars – AS

Eileen Higgins wins Miami Mayorship – Talking Headways episode

LA Streamlining – Los Angeles Times

Oldes social housing – Deutsche Welle

Dutch answer to water – Inside Climate News

Atlanta’s housing progress – Rough Draft Atlanta

Where the prarie remains – Noema

Kotek calls for new transport bill – Bike Portland

Houston residents spend on transport – Houston Public Media

Santa Fe links minimum wage to cost of housing – KRWG

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You can find the posters below and listen to the episode at Streetsblog USA or find our archive at Libsyn.

This week we’re at the 2025 Mpact Transit + Community Conference in Portland Oregon and we’re chatting with young professionals about their work that they presented at the Mpact Innovators poster session. The Innovators is an all-volunteer national networking group that organizes events and networking at the conference each year. Each of the interviews is about five minutes and we have a link to the posters in the show notes in case you want to follow along with the visuals. I will note that the poster sessions occurred during one of the evening gatherings so you may hear a bit of background noise. But there are some pretty cool ideas in here so hopefully you all stick around to check all 8 of them out.

Cameron Thompson – Sisters East Portal Transportation Hub

Veronica Mandasari – Reimagining Mill Avenue: What Tempe can Learn from Portland’s Walkable Street Design

Emily D’Antonio – TriMet Better Bus: Improving Reliability at Greeley and Going

Eric Gasper – Bridgeless to Better Burnside

Daniel Lambert – Pathways Transit Assistance Team (PTAT):  A Trauma-Informed Alternative to Object-Oriented Security on Transit Systems

Ryan Martyn – Wasted Space: Using Parking Lots to Improve Neighborhood Completeness

Jules Plotts – Employer-Centered Accessibility Model to Non-Dayshift Work

Maddy Belden – Development & Datasets

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

So adding a bus stop and kind of park and ride. To the site. So existing today, there are a couple amenities on the site that are pretty typical to some kind of highway rest stops. It’s at the junction of two highways in Oregon, um, east West Highways. And the City of Sisters is really a small town that can get a lot of tourists all at once.

And so kind of trying to facilitate some of that movement of travel there. And so we took this all the way from the planning stage through design, and then it has, uh, recently been constructed. So exciting to take it through the whole kind of planning design elements there. But the planning phase really focused on kind of what elements do you really need on this site?

What are some community needs? And so that included a park and ride facility. So adding parking spots, adding a bus pull through lane, and some parking for the buses. As well. And we also looked at kind of phasing this site, um, seeing what was needed now today and what’s needed maybe in 5, 10, 20 years. And so we also looked at some long-term parking and RV parking because it’s a very heavily used area for camping as well.

And so the planning phase really brought all those elements together and bringing in the park and ride the bus stops and then that long term parking. And then the final design phase, uh, really looked at all those and thought of how can we actually build this on the site? And so one key piece, keeping all of the elements that were part of the planning phase, how do we design these to avoid trees?

We really expressed by the community.

And that’s kind of a general kind of statement from the City of sisters is really keeping that natural feel. So we kept a lot of the existing asphalt loop that’s there today, and that’s part of the design. And then really kind of made some free flowing parking spots, um, and kind of a free flowing loop rather than your typical.

And a rectangular looking parking lot to really avoid those trees. And so that was a lot of back and forth with the city. What trees can we remove working with, uh, the city there Another added element that the city of Sisters really wanted to see if we could add was another RV dump station.

I would say it was the biggest kind of piece that I learned was how to do that, how to make it still work with vehicles, still need to be able to actually fit in these parking spots, be able to kind of circulate through the site as well. So that was definitely probably the biggest thing I’ve learned.

And then after that I try to interconnect all the indicators that I generated from this. And I want to focus on this three. And I compare between Portland strategy and strategy. And here what I found is Portland has a very organized sidewalk deficient. So they divided the sidewalk into three zones. They also have some standard for the crossing spacing.

They also have the LPI is really nice. They’re leading pedestrian intervals, so I think Temple also has to do that. We already have some plans finding document mention about the LPI, but it’s not implemented yet. And after that I did a very quick social media review about what people think when we talk about sidewalk walkability, pedestrian.

They talk about how, how hot it in Arizona, it’s very hot and how unsafe is it or because there are a lot of cars accident. So that’s why I want, I want to focus on those two, like the she and the safety management. So when you see here, this is the before after. So before there is like only a few trees on the downtown.

The sitting place also only one per corridor and they have a lot of like on street parking. So I just want wondering how, if I implement Portland strategies to here. So I divided the sidewalk zones into three and I put some crosswalk there with the LPI standard, I also get rid some of the on street parking.

But it still has the drop off zone, but the other parking, I just remove it. So this is how it looks

We don’t do that now, so we still allow the cars can pass on the street car. Track. So here I think some of them are not allowed to do that. So that’s why I feel like the LPI also is very interesting. This is like,

So. Uh, basically pedestrian can cross the street like three until seven, second ahead, start before the vehicle.

Jeff Wood: And what’s completeness?

Ryan Martyn: Completeness would be non-car access to daily essentials.

Jeff Wood: So like a 15 minute city, 15 minute neighborhood type of thing.

Ryan Martyn: 15 minute neighborhood, 20 minute neighborhood, smart growth, new urbanism. Right. I think they all are discussing the same thing, come to the same conclusion. And so, you know, how do we create a closer proximity of like housing and those essentials?

I think parking lots are a big gap. And so Portland removed parking requirements, which kind of frees up this space to be developed into something else. So. I measured every single surface parking lot in the city of Portland. Turns out that 20% of this city is off street parking, and uh, then I measured the capacity for housing on those parking lots.

So 30% of parking lots in the city are zoned to allow housing. And, uh, 21% of parking lots total have the zoning and physical requirements to develop a building. And if we apply that across the entire city, these parking lots have the capacity to build over 300,000 new homes and double the city’s population.

Jeff Wood: That’s awesome. So tell me how you did the data collection and how you like pulled all the information together.

Ryan Martyn: Yeah, so by measuring the parking lots, I used QGIS and I just went through and traced the satellite image and identified all the parking lots by manually scanning. And then I identified five case study areas, which I use neighborhood centers.

Which are something defined by the city of Portland that are concentrations of growth and in the definition they are complete neighborhoods. So I felt like that was very appropriate. And uh, then I took my five case studies. And did a 3D model of each of them to just understand the capacity for housing based on the land use laws at the time, and to understand, you know, what portion of parking lots are big enough to create a building.

That’s another question I have is like, how do you figure out which parking lots can actually be developed on? Right? Like there’s a zoning aspect of it, but there’s also like a physical space or whether a developer would be really interested in doing it or not, I’m guessing.

Yeah. Yeah, so in Portland, a standard law size is 50 by 100.

So I just went through and said, if this parking lot is at least 50 by 100, that would be feasible to build a building.

Jeff Wood: So what was your favorite part about putting this together?

Ryan Martyn: Um, I love these two images down here.

Jeff Wood: You gotta explain ’em to people in audio.

Ryan Martyn: So I created this 3D model so that I could visually represent this transformation that I’m describing if we’re going to turn parking lots into housing.

I want people to visually understand what that could be like. And so on this poster here, we’ve got one image of a strip mall. It’s like 16 city blocks. 12 of those city blocks are just parking. And so in my proposal image, we break out those 12 city blocks by creating new right of ways and filling in those blocks with, uh, housing.

Jeff Wood: That’s awesome.

Ryan Martyn: And so what do you, uh, wanna do with this next? That is a really great question that I’m not entirely sure about. I think I would like to take these diagrams and create more realistic renderings of what’s possible. I think the whole thing is like I’m just trying to show the potential of a place.

I don’t think it’s economically feasible to do what I’m describing, but I want more people to be aware that like we could have this. Yeah. The thing that came to my mind was also like the heat island effect and like what happens if you redevelop or if you put trees there and things like that. It’s really interesting.

Jeff Wood: Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Ryan Martyn: Yeah, thanks to you.

Jeff Wood: Next up is Emily D’Antonio. Her poster is entitled Tri-Met Better Bus, improving Reliability at Greeley, and Going.

And that’s how we came to these two intersections that were by the campus. And so what was causing the delay was the two signals, but then also there’s a zipper merge to the north of. The North Signal. And so what we propose is removing that zipper merge and giving the right lane to the bus to make it a bus only lane.

And then to add a right turn except bus lane right before that signal.

Land that’s in the right of way or just res striping, repainting. And so this is just a simple repainting of the lanes to remove the merge.

Yeah. So

Which I’m kind of what this was exactly. Mm-hmm. Exactly. So it’s really cool to see this. So thank you very much.

I appreciate your time.

Emily D’Antonio: Yeah, no problem.

Next up is Daniel Lambert. His poster is entitled Pathways Transit Assistance Team, P-T-A-T-A, Trauma-Informed Alternative to Object-Oriented Security on Transit Systems.

So the, uh, picture here, the graph?

Yeah.

The blue line on the graph is trans trim originating numbers. This is the number of rides that where you step onto the system the very first time and you click your, your card. This is your originating ride. The orange line, the higher number is boarding numbers. So this is, you’ve gotten off that ride and you’ve gotten back on again.

So the idea is you’ve left the vehicle and you’ve come back on, and what you’ll notice in this line is the, the distance between the blue and orange line around 2019, as one could imagine it just. Collapsed, right. Went way down to 2021. But you’ll notice that 22, 23, 24, it really never came back. And this is a big deal.

And what I try to tell people and what’s really interesting about it is a lot of people don’t realize that the currency for transit is not the dollar, it’s not the Canadian of dollar, it’s not the yen chap. Japan is massive in their, their transit operations. It’s trust. Trust is the currency for transit.

And what you’re seeing here that this line, this in the lack of space in these numbers, is a lack of trust in the system. And part of why I say that there is a lack of trust is a failure to recognize human security. We typically send police officers onto the system to secure the system to get on and make sure the train is okay to make sure the bus is okay.

The platform is okay. What I suggest is we go to human focus security, which is get on to focus on the person, Hey, this person is, has been called in on, but let’s check on this person. Let’s see why there’s a problem and let’s, let’s focus on that problem. And one of the ways we do this is changing the way we see what we call security officers.

What we, uh, transit has over 500 individuals that heal in this, this process right now. And instead of just getting yourself a basic security officer to do the job, we instead replaced them with EMTs, behavioral Health, clinicions, and Peer mentors. Now, peer mentor is with somebody who has lived in the houselessness or with drug issues or with mental health issues that they’ve since kind of come to terms with and grows themselves out.

Of that’s what a peer mentor is and they come on and they can understand the situation that they’re talking to this person about. And it is a fascinating program. And Denver has run this kind of program called Scar Fascinating. The results are online. You can actually look at all the results that they found.

Um, San Diego uses the same kind of model where they bring on mental health clinicians and EMTs and they actually. Uh, work with these folks. Sit down with ’em. Hey, let’s find you a place instead of sitting on the bus, just back and forth. Come with me. Let’s, let’s get you a place to go. So this is the idea of getting away from, uh, what we call, uh, crisis intervention Team modeling, which is law enforcement focused.

Let’s get away from that object oriented security. That is kind of the deal. One of the things you’ll notice is the picture of the law enforcement officer. You’ll notice that these uniforms here, they don’t look like law enforcement officers, and this is a really important deal when you’re talking about talking to somebody who’s involved in trauma.

When it comes to law enforcement, they’ve been constantly arrested and they dealt maybe with violence with law enforcement officers. This kind of imagery changes that model a little bit and allows that person to come in contact with this person and actually help them and look like they’re there to help.

And of course the color of the poster is purple and, and kind of a keel color. This is the, uh, international color of mental health awareness. And this is the idea is you engross that into the project and you involve that so that people can see you’re not law enforcement. You are something else. You’re here to help.

So that’s kind of what I’ve got.

Uh, for instance, EMS calls, um, fire calls when it comes to, um, health issues on the trains and on the buses. I can’t find that. Uh, when we talk about law enforcement on the system, Portland Police Department has done a pretty decent job of getting their information out there. But in CSL Mah County and Sheriff’s Office, they don’t really have the numbers to show exactly what’s been happening on the system.

So it has been really difficult to get a data analytics model based around what’s going on and actually look at what the problem is to create a better solution. And I think that would be one of the biggest frustrations that I found on the system. And the most surprising is what seems like it should be transparent isn’t.

One of the things I’ve found. A trim were to take on a project like this, they would probably save something like $30 million a year. And it’s not only good, but it’s cost saving. That’s what’s fascinating. Awesome.

Over the Willamette River,

Yeah, so we talked to a lot of, uh, businesses, cultural organizations and social services in the neighborhoods around the street to see what they were currently concerned about and what they were worried about happening during the reduced traffic. We found that people had a hard time crossing the street from the north of the south side going for example, from downtown to what’s known as Old Town Chinatown.

Um, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, both of which have a lot of social services, a lot of low income people, and a lot of needs that may not be met when there’s the confusion of construction added to a really busy street. Or when traffic goes down, just a complete change of what they’re used to.

There was also a concern that the points from east to west along the street, um, which connect two of the biggest tourist draws in the city, which are Paul’s books and. Voodoo donuts are not very in image for people wanting to go from one to the other. Where essentially the street right now is a funnel that gets people east and west really quickly.

There’s not a lot of space for cars, bikes, or other ways of getting through. So what we did was take a look at 30 years of ideas for the street, what people who live and work and need the services in the area, um, had in mind for the street, um, over the next five years and beyond. And came up with some plans for how we could activate, um, some of the space that can be reclaimed when there’s less traffic and lanes can be turned into, for example, pocket parks, temporary plazas, um, addition of bike lanes that connect to what’s going to eventually be a parked around the central city called the Green Loop.

It’s an important street. But it’s still a dangerous street. And it’s still a street that doesn’t bring people to it for anything besides going through it.

I think it would be the best if, you know, the city can take things that people who live and work in the area would like to see there and, and put it there in a phased approach where. You know, quick and easy things like res striping streets, adding bike lanes painted on, or even just adding some more greenery can prove that maybe in the long term after the bridge reopens, all the traffic that currently goes through there won’t be necessary.

So

But I flipped it around and looked at the employment location to see what kinds of populations have access to these employment locations. And so in a nutshell, I guess the reason for that is that there might be more policy angles there that we’re not looking at, like it might depend on the clustering of employers with like.

Food service jobs have a lot of like mismatch in terms of the times that transit runs there. So, uh, if there’s a clustering of, there’s a lot of small employers, the solutions might be different from like a large. Employer and transportation and warehousing like an Amazon warehouse where you might be better to partner with that employer.

Map at the block or the, the census track level. Like the block is actually a better size. Um, and so I’m interested in how you used it and how it like worked with the idea that you’re putting together, because sometimes it could be a little tricky.

Especially for larger employers, but it kind of gives us an idea of where things might be. And I usually with loads data, people use origin destination data. So they’re looking at the home and pairing it to where the worker lives and where they work. And I just looked at just the workplace and that’s because if you’re looking at that like paired data like that, you’re looking at where trips that are actually being made.

And there’s a bit of a survivorship bias there where if someone is not able to access a work location at the time that they need it, that’s not a job opportunity. So I’m looking at just the employment area and seeing are these places accessible to Metro’s, equity focus areas where Metros identified equity populations.

Even if it’s a 24 hour accessibility model, it’s still kind of be sort of a snapshot. So I’d like to like look at certain case studies where there might be a need. For shift workers and see what accessibility looks like throughout the day and maybe like ground truth that with actual qualitative data about what are people’s shift times and what other people’s needs.

That’s

sharing.

And finally, Maddie Belden. Her poster is entitled Development and Data Sets.

That isn’t grant-based. Um, and trying to standardize metrics across these three grant programs and figuring out how we can match up data evaluation and communication to data justice principles so that our communication evaluation of grants aren’t just done internally. They’re also really tied to community and their values.

And asking these recipients in their own words, what the impact of these grant placemaking program activities were. Because how the grant program works is that applicants from around the region can apply based on their own placemaking activities that they wanna propose around the region. And then if they get it, they get to facilitate the program and report back on what they did with the grant money.

And so it’s really interesting quotations at this. This previous intern created with community about what the impacts were in their own words, rather than trying to put it in the words of a grant program that’s administrative by a regional government. So it was really interesting, and then I continued to do research externally after that on what data justice is and how it’s applied.

At other, um, regional governments, if, if that was a thing which I wasn’t actually seeing. Um, so trying to see how, um, nonprofit organizations apply data justice lenses to their communities and to their work. And then also looking at data justice in terms of big data sets, which is a lot different from the more small data sets that I’m working with here.

Grantees information and evaluative information. Just being able to see all the people who have contributed to the work of this team over the past few years and being able to synthesize it together. It’s been like a really fun brain exercise of like how these things are all interconnected and how they can all contribute to making the community investment team more equitable.

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The answer Samuel and David then believe isn’t writing a new paper with the facts, re-framing an issue with new language, or trying to get someone to believe the earth is actually round if they are already so positive that it is not, but rather changing people’s social identities through organizing.

To do this, people need to get involved and go through something together. Which is exactly what Carter Lavin discusses in his recent book (and on Talking Headways) on transportation organizing “If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight”. Going and talking to people in person, getting them involved in a cause, and even better winning a policy fight is going to change people’s perspectives more than a white paper.

This is why I think some get “The War on Cars” podcast and the movement around safe streets and urbanism wrong sometimes. Because its more about a movement and bringing people into the fold on the issues that matter to that movement in order to get policy wins.

The War on Cars, Not Just Bikes, and urbanist shows like CityNerd and many others like it have changed people’s social identity to connect with certain values on active transportation. We often diminish YouTubers and social media stars in this respect to our detriment as they are often the ones setting social identity markers and culture.

We talk about congestion pricing a lot as a positive outcome and a winning issue, but what we haven’t talked much about is the all out organizing war that took place after Governor Hochul paused the implementation.

After pausing pricing, safe streets and active transportation traditional organizing and social media went nuts to push people to call the governor and state representatives to turn the system on. Thousands of calls were made and I personally believe that if there was no pushback from a movement that had been cultivated over many years, pricing wouldn’t have happened despite Governor Hochul’s claims.

But people don’t like being told what to do, they want to come to that finding together.

There’s a new study out from the Santa Fe Institute that finds people hate being told what to do on climate change. Even more than previously thought, people (3,000 Germans specifically in the survey) don’t like forced bans on things that would positively impact climate change like reducing meat consumption or setting thermostat limits.

And setting aside the fact that I don’t think anyone has called for central city car bans in the name of overarching climate change rather than improvements in air quality and traffic safety, people don’t like the idea of government entities taking away the ability to drive somewhere they did before. Anyone who reads this newsletter knows that fact. But European cities have been enacting center city car restrictions more and more, but not necessarily for “climate change” writ large.

So what’s interesting from digging into the paper is that the researchers come to the same conclusion as Samuel and David did with respect to the car free city centers, though not other bans that were considered invasive of personal control like meat.

“Nonetheless, changing peoples’ beliefs about policy effectiveness could support agreement with the targeted green behavior. If a person came to believe that, say, banning cars from cities was effective in mitigating climate change, dropping one’s opposition to the car ban would reduce cognitive dissonance.”

So if someone organized with people enough to get them to change their mind because it now fit their beliefs and identity, then the policy would become more palatable.

I don’t believe this is the whole answer, but it’s part of a whole. We still need white papers and good information, but we also need way more organizing that we have now to get the policy wins we want.  As Carter mentioned on the podcast, no one will say that we have too many transportation organizers…we still need a lot more.

***

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Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood: Carter Lavin, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Carter Lavin: Thank you, Jeff. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be back.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure,

We are a transit advocacy group in the nine Bay Area County region. I’m also the author of the book that just came out. If you want to win, you’ve got to fight a Guide to Effect on transportation advocacy. From Island Press, which I wrote because there’s a lot of people in the world, a lot of your listeners who want the world to be better, who have great ideas about what needs to be done, but are having a hard time winning those changes.

And so I wrote a book about Here’s how to win. I interviewed dozens and dozens of activists from across the country, successful by and trans and street safety advocates to get their stories and how they won or how they lost, and condense it down to about 200 pages so that. Whether someone’s trying to get more rail service or a speed bump that they say, okay, now I, now I know how to go about doing it.

Hopefully we get a lot more people fighting and winning.

The way I think of it is the journey’s always been happening because I’ve been a climate activist since I was a teenager. You know, I’m, uh, my mid thirties now. And when I was a teenager, people say, oh, well, you know, far off in the future. You know, 2025, you know, 2030, California’s gonna be on fire all the time with climate change.

And I was like, well, I, that’s not bad for the people in the future. I’m gonna be a person in the future. And so I’ve always been very. Aware of this. And I had a whole career in the solar industry and the rooftop solar industry because, killing coal was an essential part to how we stop climate change.

And that entire time in that industry, we made a lot of progress to fight, you know, tooth and nail against a lot of different entities to win. And I kept seeing on the transportation side of things, like us not making the level of progress I would like to see from a climate perspective and just from a community perspective that.

The bike lanes, the transit service, all that stuff wasn’t happening at the speed and scale that I and you and so many of your listeners wanted. And so several years ago, I kicked up this fight to get a bus only lane on the Bay Bridge, which spoiler alert, we haven’t won that yet. But through that experience, which I talk about in the book, in the intro in chapter one, you know, to help me get a lot more firmly in the transportation advocacy space.

Which also helps show me that there is a ton of space. There is, at no point will someone say, Hey, we’re full up. We have too many transportation advocates. No, too many transit organizers. Like, Hey, stick to your life. Like, no, no. There is so much need. And so did a bunch of stuff, helped put together Trans Bay Coalition and throughout this process that kept being this, how do we learn to be better activists?

How do we teach more people to be better activists? Because people would say. Hey, that’s great about your bust lane fight there. I’m trying to get something done in Santa Clara County. How do I do this? It was like, oh, well here’s how to do this. Here’s how to, make a crew and form a coalition. You know, things that chapters four and five talk about.

And, you know, over time I just got much more into this active process of training activists across the country, which I still do independently through my business. Art lab.com has more details on that. And, you know, through the training, through the writing about the, through the presentations. I talked to Island Press, or they reached out and they said, Hey, would you like to submit a book proposal?

I said, oh my God, it’s a book contract. They’re like, no, no. You have to submit a book proposal. So that was a lot of work. Did that, they said, yes. Then I wrote a book, and so at the one hand it’s the journey started about two-ish years ago when they first reached out. But you know, I think for me, this journey also really started as a teenager in the suburbs of DC who.

Could bike into the big city who could bike to metro and take the red line hen who like moved to Philadelphia and had all these experiences and you know, just recognize like, oh, we want this. And living many years of realizing that, okay, it doesn’t matter that we’re right. You know, it doesn’t matter that like, yes, transit is mathematically the way to move a lot of people from point A to point B.

That a protected bike lane is a way of getting a lot of people safely onto bikes. It doesn’t matter that we’re right. We get a clock clean all the time. It’s like, okay, so. Given that we know what the answers are, how do we actually win them? Like how do we get this? And that has been work of study in practice for many years and shows up in the book.

And I am interested in this discussion about. Politics writ large or small P politics and like the difference between that and like what’s happened in the country as, you know, it pertains to like partisan politics and the mess that that is.

It’s,

This is great. But the process of getting it, they find very distasteful. Mm-hmm. You know, it’s like they want the meal, but they hate the cooking and it’s, I get it. You know, it’s a very different thing. Like one thing about transit personally that I think really appeals to a lot of people is like. There is a logic and a clarity and it’s, you know, it’s straight lines and things like that.

There’s like a kind of a beauty in logic to it. And then you look at the political process and you say, Yee, this is like a lot of like big feelings and people and ego and who knows, and oh my God, and this is so scary and this is a big mess and it makes everything worse and I just want it to all go away.

And you know, there’s three big things I like to say about this, which I talk about in chapter one to really focus on. Because if we don’t accept the fact. This is deeply political that if that mess is part of the beautiful thing that we want, that, you know, we can’t get the high speed rail systems that we want just by drawing lines and doing math.

Like we have to do the messy politics. So like we have to get comfortable with the mess. So there’s three things I think about as I talked about in chapter one. One is you’re doing this already, like you are already in the mess. Like you are not separated from that. So like, you know. Terrible news. The call is coming from inside the house.

Like, so you, Jeff, like this is a, yeah. Like this is a deeply political thing. You listener 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.

So kind of recognizing like, oh, we’re all, this is happening. This is part of our life. This is not something that like you opt into in October of a election year. Like this is all the time. Politics is all the time, which gets us to two, which is politics is simply the act of people and society relating to each other.

And so all of that’s politics. So partisanship, the really noisy, annoying part, you know, red versus blue, all that. That’s a segment that is a small, noisy segment of politics, but everything is politics. You know, you talking to family members at Thanksgiving about how to take the bus in town or any of that stuff like that is political because you are impacting other people’s lives.

So recognizing that politics is kind of everywhere. Not only are you in it, but it’s everywhere. And then thirdly. Yes, it might be noisy and seemingly chaotic, but there is a logic to politics like this is something that can be figured out. This is like an ecosystem, and 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.

It’s like, well, except we do. We do this all the time. We say, okay, well beings, they’re like, we’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. That’s why this book really lays out, here’s all these types of things and why chapter one, you know, starts with like, Hey, this is political and this is in fact radical.

And 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, I think so you should learn to embrace that, or at least begrudgingly accept it, because then you could start saying, okay, given the thing I want is really political, given that my speed bump requires a political struggle.

The question now is, how do I win a political struggle for a speed bump? You say, oh, okay. 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. Oh, that’s chapters, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And that makes it a digestible problem that when the people see this noise of politics and I see the energy and passions and the twists and the turns and all that stuff, and recognizing okay, that’s.

Ecosystem. There are maybe not necessarily rules to it, but there are patterns in that and the patterns are recognizable. And so if you’re the kind of person who listens to a podcast like this and you know, maybe can decipher a Tokyo subway map, like you can also decipher American politics. It is not.

I would say it’s slightly less complicated than some of the subway maps.

You know, like your speed bump inherently, like literally disrupts the lives of those around you. Like that is in fact what you’re going for. You are saying people are driving too fast on this road. I would like to disrupt that pattern that is disruptive and there’s conflict in that. ’cause there’s some people who don’t want that, but something that’s.

Really important for the conflict avoidant among us, myself included. Are you sure? Oh yeah. I, we, that’s a, we could talk a lot, uh, like a great thing about politics is that it’s a lot of indirect conflict. Like for someone who’s maybe a listener in a small town, they say, you know, my mayor keeps ignoring me.

And I’ve, you know, had a training session with a person who said, you know, I tell my mayor all the time about bikes up and my mayor ignores me. And they’re like, what do I do? Like, what do I say to them? It’s like you don’t say anything else to the mayor. You say you talk to 200 other people in your community, you get them to like the bike, then you get them to talk to the mayor.

that’s you having conflict with that mayor, but you don’t have to actually deal with them. And so for people, as you’re saying, who are like, Ooh, this is noisy and I don’t wanna deal with that, it’s like, great, you don’t have to deal with that. Like you could talk to the people on your side and get them to do stuff and get them to call the mayor and have that conversation.

That’s what you’re doing and like recognizing that there are so many different roles and there are definitely roles for the, you know, there are people who are conflict diverse, there are people who, seek conflict and we need those people as well. And, you know, kind of recognizing that there’s space in all of this sport.

Yeah.

Yeah. Those types of things. Folks have a lot of power though, and they haven’t used it yet. So if you’re listening to this show, obviously you’re into this already and you have more power maybe than you think.

Part of that power comes from the fact that if you’re listening to the show, you might know what a Ballard is. You might know the difference between a speed hump and a speed cushion. Like there’s the Jeff Woods archive that you can now search through. that is not even a master’s level, that is a PhD in this stuff.

And if you’re someone who’s just casually listened to the show over the years, or just recently picked up, like you are now head and shoulders above the average person in your community in terms of knowledge of this stuff. And that’s wonderful. And that means you have a better insight into where to pick the conflict that you wanna have.

So for example, bus buildouts are not exactly a epsy thing. They are the concrete extensions into the road so that the bus stop is not just the flat sidewalk goes into the road. I’m sure some of your listeners might wanna correct me on how I explain that, but that’s generally the gist of it. It is both good from a backup, calming perspective, and it’s good from a.

Transit facilitation, speed perspectives, and it’s great for accessibility, makes it easier and more comfortable to ride the bus. Your listeners know that or some, you know, they can listen to any number of episodes. Jeff, feel free to insert the episode number here of that one to per personal learn and you’re like, wow, that’s great.

It’s a cool, so then take that idea, you know, reading through my book, particularly chapters two through four. Help a person say, okay, well it’s now I know what we want. I know what the solution is. Now’s the easy part. I just need to get other people involved. Okay, so let’s write the petition. Let’s get the coalition letter.

Let’s talk to other people about it. Basically, if you want to think about this as you all be experts listening, like you have all this theoretical knowledge, you know what works in your community. Now the next up is to make it practical. Apply it, saying, okay, we know that bus bulb outs are good or ho slip lanes are good.

Where are the slip lanes in your community? And you’re saying, okay, we want to get the slip lane on Main Street closed. Okay. Just that one. Or there are a couple other ones. Like, let’s talk about, let’s get that data, let’s make that petition, let’s do that coalition. Whether it’s talk to the community, let’s put this knowledge that you have into action, because no one out there is saying slip lanes.

Now keep this open. Like there’s not a counter protesting movement who’s like trying to collect a thousand signatures around this stuff. Like one great part about fighting the war on cars, so to speak, is we already don’t have so many of the things that we want. Like we are on the attack. Like there’s no compromised position you need to take because you already don’t have the thing.

Like we are trying to remove the slip lanes or close those kind of things, or get the protected bike lane, or improve the bus service or get the high speed rail built and you as an activist, like, what’s the mayor gonna do? Ignore you. Okay, cool. They’re already ignoring you. So just make it harder for them to ignore you.

Make it higher consequences for them to ignore you. Like you are not gonna get fired from your random job as long as you don’t work for the city and you’re doing this, like you’re not gonna get fired from your job for doing this. So do it. You know the consequences that. Your county supervisor can enact on you.

One, they don’t even want to do that, but like if you’re like, let’s get thousands of people to sign this petition saying we want to close all slip lanes in my city because they’re deadly and they’re killing people, and it’s better to save lives than speed up cars, what they’re gonna say, no, congrats.

They’ve already said no to you, so you might as well roll up your sleeves and get fighting because that’s the only way you’re gonna

Yeah.

Regional measure effort in the Bay Area that’s needed to keep it alive and get involved if you’re in the Bay Area. I didn’t create bart. I wasn’t like, I wasn’t around. And so I’m internally grateful for all the people who’ve done that. That every sidewalk that you yourself have not built or advocated for, like that exists because of somebody else.

So on one level, yes, there is like so much stuff that hasn’t been done on another level, another layer. So much stuff already has been done. There are beautiful rail lines out there and bus services and things like that. We’re actually here to say, great, let’s take it further. And that’s not gonna happen unless we fight for it.

That you know, someone may have not handed you the baton in your community. Say, Hey, this is the bus advocates from the eighties or nineties, and here you go. And if you’re someone who’s listening to this and been waiting to be invited into the fight, here’s your invitation. go out there, go fight. If you wanna win, you gotta fight.

The book is. Available on Island Press. I’ll help you do it. Yeah, you can make those changes. And I think helping people recognize that like every improvement’s worth doing, and even if it’s just, oh, I want there to be a better bike rack in front of my coffee shop. Great fight for that. Go push for that. Go talk to the coffee shop owner.

Go talk to your city, figure out what that is. Worst case scenario, go install it yourself.

Well, Carter’s book tells you how to solve it, and there’s a lot of discussions in your books specifically about how you define who makes policy, what’s the inside outside game, what’s the process like for making these changes? And I appreciate that you actually laid out like the definition of who a decision maker is.

Tried to pull the, the curtain down around what lawmaking actually is and how it works. And so there’s all these things that, I’ve been in this for 20 years almost now, and there’s a lot of things in this that I was like, well, I feel like I knew that kind of on the outside, but I didn’t really think about it in the way that the process is, you do this, you do this, boom, you can win.

Writing my book. I was like, this, my book is the sequel to all of those. Or if you’ve read my book first, it’s the prequel. You should check out those other books because it is so important to understand what these issues are and, you know. Let’s talk about our car transportation system and how our freeways are overbuilt and the high cost of free parking like that is extremely important.

Like it is important that we are right as a movement, and it is great that that is extremely well documented that we’re right and you can be right all day and get your claps clean. And I think any one of your listeners, and we all know that this happens all the time, people who are wrong win a lot. that’s not good.

Being right does not automatically guarantee that you’ll win. And so we need to learn how to fight more. And so if you wanna win, you’ve gotta fight. Pick up where a lot of those books leave off and my book doesn’t tell you what to fight for. You know, obviously like point at some things like, hey, this is transportation and bikes and street safety, and all these kind of good stuff.

You could read this and say, I would like to remove a freeway. Or you could read this and say, how do we get a high-speed rail built? Or how do we get more trained service or protect our bus service? Because as we were talking about, this is all part of that ecosystem of action. you know, chapter one explains, Hey, this is political.

Gets people comfortable. Chapter two talks to people about how to even think about a campaign. Like who are these decision makers, you know, when you, when people say. Well, I want better bus service. It’s like, well, good news. The person in charge of bus service has a name. They’re in your community. You could find them.

They have a title, they have a email address. They have a phone number. They have people that they listen to. They have people that they care about. We have, you know, let’s kind of talk about power mapping, which is not an idea I came up with, but it’s bringing them in from other spaces, which chapter three talks about like how to understand your context and cultural connections.

Slowly but surely helping people build out these campaigns because everything is a campaign. You could say, well, I want to get bus service returned to my community, or to, I want the bus stop to be moved two blocks over. I don’t like the stop being there. I want it to be here. Those are all fights that’s all stuff that takes an effort to make happen.

Yeah, and so I think these, like the transportation reform space is really blessed to have so many wonderful thinkers who told. All these stories who’ve done this work to say, here’s what the problem is, here’s what the solutions are. And I wanted to make sure that I, or this book was not setting agnostic, but it’s not the, here’s how I want a thing.

’cause I don’t want someone to think, oh wow, Carter Lavin helped win a billion dollars for trans in California. You know, or any of the other things I fought like it was, yeah, good for Carter Lavin, but what’s that mean for you in Memphis or in, Tallahassee or you know, Arkansas. It’s like, yeah. So the book takes away a lot of like the narrative of advocacy, which was a very interesting writing experience of saying like, we are talking about cooking.

Like instead of saying, here’s a meal saying, so here’s how to hold the knife and cut the celery or whatever, cut the vegetable of your choice. Uh, so it was a lot of like deconstructing the story because so often, you know, people see the news, they see the news about what’s happening, they’ll say, oh yeah, I saw that transit funeral that the people in the Bay Area did, and that caused a huge hullabaloo.

So do I do a transit funeral? How do you do a transit funeral? And it’s helpful to say, okay, so that actually was like the outcropping of this gigantic network of other things. And so like, hey, chapters four through seven help you understand that because we aren’t taught this. You know, people aren’t taught how to make change in our community.

Or maybe you had a civics class in high school. but besides that, this isn’t information that’s just freely given. And when it is, it’s generally not. Given for kind of us transportation nerds. like it’s generally said, okay, okay, here’s, big political movement spaces or other spaces where someone’s like, okay, that’s great for like the healthcare industry.

Or, you know, pick any number of issues ’cause people fight on any number of issues. But like, but what about us in the transportation space? And so I really wanted to make, if you wanna win, you gotta fight. Speak very much short through because we gotta fight.

Right. You have to say what the folks in, Illinois did about like the bike lanes on the shoulders and things like that. Right. So, yeah. You gotta get into a little bit of storytelling ’cause that’s what people gravitate to toward the most part. But it is kind of a kid of parts. Right. And, and also.

If you did tell the story of like how Nashville lost their transit election to a bunch of like AV lovers, like, you know, you don’t know all of the machinations behind the politics of it. And also all the people in that story are different from the people in your story, right? Yeah. Like, and the people in your neighborhood are gonna be different from that.

And that goes to like the idea of context, right? Like, so you talk about context in the book and I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about that, because I think it’s interesting to think about the cultural, the historical, the political context of things that you’re trying to get into.

And you know, and I talk about some stories. There’s Jose from Minnesota. He tells this great story about how. When it comes to freeway removal, he first starts talking about the whole history of what was there before the freeway, what was the community, what was lost, and how that really helps get people fired up.

And so it’s like great to tell that story in the book or a little snippet of it. And it’s so important to help people understand like your community’s different, every community’s different. In the United States, there’s some probably big overarching things that make a lot of our communities similar in terms of car dominance and what our community tends to spend money on.

But a big thing is helping folks understand like, what is happening in your community today? You know, maybe you are, you don’t think your mayor cares of any, okay, well, they’re gonna like the official, how did they do in their last election? Do they win by a lot or by a little? And the answer to that changes a lot about your campaign.

It changes a lot about who you go to say, well, okay, do they listen to these groups or those groups like. Okay, in these groups, is it group A, B, C, or D? You know, helping people understand this and helping map out their community is so essential because if you don’t understand that, it’s very easy to view your opposition or your target as just this huge wall, this big model at this undifferentiated mass of No, and it’s really helpful to say, okay, well, in talking about street safety, yes, my.

Local chamber of commerce or what have you, doesn’t really care so much about this. Okay? But maybe the individual businesses do, especially the business right here where they saw a person get hit by a car. I’ll talk to that business and slowly but surely, you kind of build up your supporters this way and you know, so chapter three really helps people understand how to translate from like bollard speak of.

Hey, you can’t say to someone like, hi, local business owner. You were listening to Overhead Wire recently and they were talking about this. They’re like, no, I’ve never even heard of what you’re talking. Or maybe they have, maybe your people are real cool, but like, how do we translate this and put in terms that people care about?

So the second half of chapter three really talks about that of saying, okay, now that you know, what are these points of connection? How do you translate? How do you sell to people based on their values? Which is something that. Was delightful in my interviews with dozens and dozens of advocates across the country to like see what that looks like in their community and how that kind of reflects their community’s culture.

Because you do have to get specific, even though I think one thing that’s interesting about transportation advocacy is high speed rail is objectively the best way to move people between, was it 200 and 500 miles or something like that. Like it doesn’t matter what continent you’re on, it doesn’t matter what hemisphere.

Like That’s true. It’s like, okay, cool. What are the people in those different cities in your community, what do they care about? You know, all that matters. And helping understand how to localize your advocacy is really important because, you know something I’ve seen before, you can’t say to someone like, oh, hey, you should vote for this thing or support this.

Good. It’s good for everybody. I say, okay, that’s good for everybody, but what about me? And you know, it is our job to say, great point. So, hey, this street that you’re crossing, you see how that car’s really dangerous right now? If there were this speed bumper, this intervention, they drive slower. And so you have a safer time crossing.

But, oh, okay. This is good for me crossing here because I go to that coffee shop. I get it. And so chapters two, uh, three particularly focus on like how do you get to that level of like translating your big values of the vision or I saw this thing on YouTube and that looked really cool and I wanted in my communion.

It’s like, okay, so. Here’s how you translate the wonderful things, Ray, if City nerd was saying about what happens in other communities into like, how do you talk about it in your neighborhood, which goes into chapter four of saying. How do you work with your crew now? How do you work with these allies and so on from there?

You know, like one thing of is funny about advocacy is there’s this big push to efficiency. Like you wanna be really good and efficient. At the other hand, like you do wanna create something that takes as many people and absorbs as many people as possible, because having a lot of people on your side is inherently like one of the things we are trying to do.

So, you know, if you’re like, oh, well I can get a robot, they’ll knock on a thousand doors. Like, yeah, that’s not helpful. Like you need to talk to the people, you need to do the work, like doing the work matters. And at the same time you’re like, well that sounds, doing the work sounds like work. Like yeah, it is.

And it’s hard. It’s not, and it’s often not paid at all or paid very poorly and the hours are long and stressful. And so getting good at asking for help, getting good at structuring the work so that people can help. Is essential and it’s different. So I have strong opinions about what works for me and my organizing in the Bay Area, especially for this regional transit funding measure, which is super essential to pass.

And what’s gonna work in different communities is different. so some communities, they really do want the like weekly meeting where at the meeting we have the first 30 minutes we talk about everything and the next 90 minutes is we do a bunch of work together. And that just like a regular thing.

It’s like going to the gym, it’s a workout, something. I personally, I do a lot of regional organizing, so showing up in person is really hard because fundamentally we’re organizing people across like hundreds of miles. and a thing about being a transportation advocate is it tends to be hard to get with your fellow transportation advocate.

’cause the thing that unites you is, hey, isn’t it hard to get to the place where we want? And so for me, I think one of the big constants is, you know, making it easy for people to step up, making it meaningful. So it’s not just make work you, you know, you have to do something that has a difference. And as I say in chapter four, like don’t make it hard for people to say no to volunteer.

Make it easy for someone to say yes. So for example, like an hour ago, I had a call on a Slack channel saying like, Hey, does everyone here have a stack of flyers? Who wants a stack of flyers for passing out about the regional measure? And someone’s like, oh wait, I don’t have a stack of flyers yet. I was like, okay, do you, do you want us to like send you the PDF so you could print it or do you want us to like hand deliver a stack of flyers?

Thank you so much for raising your hand. And that’s just part of the work of like, okay, breaking the task in. And I think one thing that’s so important to think about when you are like newer to being a volunteer leader, like a leader of volunteers, is recognizing the need to like. Break down the task as much as possible.

Basic kind of management in that sense, while also creating space. So if someone says, oh yeah, no, I know how to do that. I’m happy to take the ball and run with it, but you don’t like continue to baby them, you say, great, here you go. Like have fun, like go for it. And that’s tricky ’cause you never really know.

And I like, I think about it like. If someone’s saying, Hey, it’s the holiday season, I’m gonna come over. I’ll help you cook dinner. How can I help some people? You could say, great, I need you to make the mashed potatoes. And they’ll be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about some, okay. I need you to build that pot with water, put it on there and turn it on, high and put potatoes in it.

When it’s rain, they’re like, okay, that I can do. And so recognizing that different people want different stuff and that it’s all volunteer, you know, people can walk away the second they don’t feel like it. It is good to be nice because that’s just inherently a good thing. And if you’re a big old jerk, people aren’t wanna work with you.

Like that’s a huge thing. And I think that’s just a, it’s important to be nice for a lot of reasons.

You have to get approval from the state, you have to do all these things. you have different opinions probably about like what kind of tax that should be. Should it be a sales tax, should it be a gross receipts tax? Should it be a property tax? Should it be an employment tax or whatever it is? How do you get to those final decisions and go forward?

Yeah, that’s a very good question.

And so I find that extremely helpful in terms of saying, okay, well what are we gonna do about that? And so some people might say. For example, Hey, I support transit and I want AC Transit and Bart and Muni, hell train to not die. Okay, how do I help? It’s like, great. That’s a good conversation. We can talk about that.

here’s the flyer, here’s the thing. Go all this stuff. for some people when it’s like, oh, we’re having a disagreement about, well I want a bike lane, or you know, I don’t care about your bike lane. I don’t wanna lose these two parking spots. Okay, well then we’re in disagreement. You know, we could talk about the two parking spots.

We can talk about. Okay. It’s two of 20 parking spots on the street. It’s two of a hundred parking spots, you know, in a quarter mile radius. You know, we can have that conversation and maybe someone still says, yeah, I disagree. You know, like, okay, cool. Well, we’re not in agreement about that. I’ll move on.

I’ll get other people. And I think one part that’s so important, and chapters two and three talk about this a bit, is like, it means a different thing if it’s. Some random on the street who disagrees with you versus a local business owner versus your mayor or your governor, and therefore, what you need to do about that changes.

If it’s some random person on the street who disagrees with you, it’s okay, go talk to another person. The elected official, when they’re saying, oh wow, a thousand people signed this petition, for them, generally they think, okay, is it a big number of people? You know, maybe you’re in a smaller community and getting just 50 people to sign the thing.

We’re like, wow, 50 people, and they’ll say, okay. What do like the general number of people think? I’m like, okay, here’s some big number of people they agree. I’m like, okay, that’s good to know. And they’ll say, okay. And there’s like four other people who I really care about this stuff. Like, here’s the person I listen to about this stuff.

Here’s the person I, I don’t wanna tick off about this stuff. I’ll check in with them. What do they have to say about that? And they’re like, okay, great. I formulated opinion. And so one thing to your original question about like politics and disagreement and agreement is recognizing that agreement as a purpose.

So consider, how important is it? for example, you know, there’s a, a bike lane effort in my community that I’ve been pushing for that’s, you know, in the process of happening and you know, people might say, oh well the businesses, they don’t like bike lanes ’cause it’s, parking spots and blah, blah blah.

And I went to a custom sofa shop who was on that door. Door like, you know, I’m just knocking on every door. I might as well go in. I don’t think they’re gonna support this ’cause a sofa shop and I figure like trucks or whatever. And they said, oh no, we all bike to work. The custom sofas get delivered from the factory.

What? You know, whatever. Like, oh, okay. Cool. I’m glad I asked. And I think one thing in our transportation space is a lot of times there are folks who might be so overwhelmed by the enormity of car culture and car dominance. That’s all around us that the concept of finding allies, it’s easier to think, you know, no one agrees with me, but, well, you, haven’t talked to everyone.

So go talk to people like guess what, you’re on the bus. There’s other people on the bus with you. You want better bus service. There’s inherently like a bunch of other people on that bus with you will agree. And so going out, finding ’em, and you’re not just agreeing for the sake of saying like, Hey, let’s go.

I’ll go be friends and talk about how much we love the bus. Which, be friends. Talk about how much you love the bus, but like do something with that. And so if someone says, Hey, I don’t wanna flyer, you say, okay, cool, I’m gonna pa pass out flyers. Do you want to help design a flyer? Do you wanna do this?

Or. How would you like help? And they might say, I don’t wanna help. They’re like, okay, cool. I’m gonna go talk to people who do.

Yes. Like you can tell people that are crossing a busy street why that busy street might be dangerous to them in their high heels.

If you are saying to someone like, Hey, watch out. You should feel a different thing about how you feel now. Like, Hey, that street’s dangerous and here is a thing you could do about right now. Like here is a flyer, here is the QR code. I’m not asking you to like show up at some meeting in three days and put something on your calendar and wait for four hours.

I’m saying, can you add your name to this list? And someone’s like, oh, okay, cool. That’s easy. I can do it. Because otherwise, if we’re not asking people to do something, if we’re not putting that agreement to use, what we’re really saying to a person in the street safety world is like, Hey, right now, feel bad.

Like, Hey, is your kid at the street corner? You should feel bad right now. You should feel afraid. It’s a lot easier for that person to say, no, I think I want to feel annoyed by you and ignore you, rather than feel bad about what’s happening in my life right now. Like that doesn’t, nah, that’s not good.

That’s not what I want. And so saying, Hey, just a heads up this thing, the street isn’t as safe as it could be. Here’s the thing, can you sign it? We’re trying to get it fixed. They’re like, okay, yeah, I’m open to that idea because you’re giving me something to do with it. And I think this comes up a lot of times in.

All sorts of advocacy spaces where if we’re fundamentally just trying to tell a person, Hey, feel bad right now without any sort of, and do something with it. Like, but like, no, I don’t want to, that seems not fun. And this is, for people who are familiar with like union organizing spaces, they say it’s educate, agitate, organize, like agitating people, disrupting their day, letting them understand like, Hey, this could be better.

This isn’t good. That is very useful. If you then organize it, otherwise you were just agitated peoples.

Right? That’s not really bad cop. It’s just good cop, rowdy cop.

There are people who are making that decision, who have close access to it. So that might be the mayor and the city council and the staff to that, and the people that they listen to. And maybe that’s a city employee, maybe that’s a close advisor or a personal. Then the outside is just literally everybody else.

So all of us are somewhere along the spectrum of inside, outside, and it changes depending on the issue. Like it’s the holiday season. If you and other people in your household are talking about household decorations, like you are very much on the inside of that decision making process. I am on the outside of that decision making process.

And your mayor is on the outside of your decision making process around your household decorations. So it’s all the stuff. All the stuff. And so when it comes to talking about. Getting a new bike lane in town, you know, there are people who maybe have inside access, maybe they’re people in your community who have donated to a mayoral campaign.

Maybe they door knock, maybe they’re personal friends, maybe they’re on some bike commission for the city and whatever. There are people who have like inside knowledge of there. And then we have other folks out there who are just the people in the community. And if you’re saying, Hey, we both want this bike lane to be built.

You have different positions, that you’re coming to this from, which chapter six talks about in a lot more detail. Like, you know, you’re coming to this from different decision making process points. You have different levels of access, you have different types of power, and so it’s very natural that there might be inherent tension that, you know, the person on the bike advisory committee says, oh yeah, that road is slated to get a bike lane in six years.

And I know it took us 20 years to even get that slated for six years. So I’m not gonna like light my hair on fire and make a whole ruckus. And the other person who’s outside the process says, cool, that’s six years from now. My kid is six and I need this now. Like our understanding of what is urgent is really different, and our appreciation of what the amount of work that goes in is very different.

And so it’s very easy for there to be tension between these like inside advocates and outside advocates. And. When they work together, they’re extremely powerful. And so chapter six really focuses on how to understand these kind of confusing relationships a bit better and how to work at them better.

Because it is so helpful when a person who has more inside access says the outsiders like, Hey, by the way, the mayor is showing up at this event pretty soon. That’s when you should deliver the thousand petition signers or. The person on the outside says, Hey, we’re doing this giant rollout bike ride soon.

I’m happy to pass out a flyer. What’s the thing I should be passing out on that flyer? And there’s so many other ways that they can work together. And so doing that is really essential. And it’s a concept to be very clear, I’m not the originator of biz. Uh, this is, you know, something that’s existed in a lot of other spaces.

The civil rights movement does a lot of great stuff on inside outside gain. There’s so much that we can learn from and you know, and I think also. A greater understanding of that as well as coalitions from chapter five, like just different groups working together. I find it makes the like angst of politics a lot easier to understand because it helps you go from saying, oh, well now I’m frustrated that person A, in my community who I want to be pushing harder.

Oh, I recognize we’re on the same team. We’re just in different positions. So now the question is not, why are they terrible? It’s how can I help them do better in their position? How do I do better in my position? How do we collaborate more? And maybe the person doesn’t wanna collaborate with you and you say, okay, well now how do I find someone who does collaborate with them and all this stuff.

But I, I find it makes the, like, fierce ecosystem of politics, you know, a lot less scary, a lot easier to understand. And so I think chapter six is gonna be a great delight to a lot of folks here who, you know, if you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance that you might feel very on the outside of your community.

You might feel like you are the only one you know, in Norman, Oklahoma who really cares about this stuff. If you’re a person who listens to this, there’s a good chance that you’re like, yeah, I work for the Spokane Department of Transportation. I feel like I’m the one true believer here, and I really don’t like that.

The other advocates just keep yelling at me as if I have a magic wand. It’s like, yeah, you can work together. Here’s how to work together.

Right. And I have a few examples in my head, but I just kind of wanna get the general idea out there.

You’re being a little too rowdy. You are gonna overturn the Apple card or I’m going to lose access to the powers that be because I’m associated. And a lot of times like, tough, that sounds like a new problem, but recognizing that the point of access is to do stuff. And I think one thing that is tricky is kind of syncing up of like, well, what’s the game we’re playing?

Are we playing, I want this one bike lane now, or are we playing, I want. 20 bike lanes in the next 20 years, like what’s gonna happen? How do we prevent overreach? And so it’s kind of always a dance and it’s an always an opportunity for people to get better at it. And one thing I’m hoping my book, if you wanna win, you gotta fight.

Got to Effective transportation advocacy helps people do is it helps provide the shared language so that you know, maybe you’re an outsider and you’re really frustrated with your insider ally. You say, Hey, here’s this book I just read. So I see myself as the outside person. You’re the inside person. Can we just like talk about this?

It’s like, hey, now we’re in like couples therapy and talking about our relationship, but like you should talk about your relationship with your advocates, like the relationship that you have with each other and like figure that out because you are in relations and so, and you know, they might tell you, yeah, no, hey outsiders, you’re right.

This is our relationship and you’re right. I am telling you to cool ed. Here’s why. And it just kind of helps ’em recognize like that they might need to explain that better or point to something. And if you find yourself as an inside advocate, frustrated with outsiders who are, overly rowdy, which is generally not the issue, our movement has, our, our movement is not overly rowdy.

Yeah. Maybe one day we’ll get to be and can write a sequel. Um, but, but generally speaking, it’s like. Helping them understand who they should yell at. You know, if you say, Hey, actually it’s, our mayor is fine. It’s the council that’s terrible. Go yell at them. Or, oh, okay, good. Thank you for letting me know. I will go do a this thing.

And so having that insight, having those conversations is really important.

Politics is a lot about making allies and like comrades and working together and coalitions and all this stuff with people. You’re going to make friends. You might find the love of your life through us, but like you’re not here to make friends. You’re here to make allies, and those are slightly different things.

You could be like, we work together well and I hate this person’s jokes and that’s. You’re like, I, there’s a whole part of this book that I had to take out where I got, I realized I got way too into that chapter four, how to work together with others. you know, I, know I’m not a perfect person yet.

I’m working there. Probably won’t get there within this lifetime, but like rec has a, okay, given that we’re all in perfect beings, how do we collaborate together? That’s a big thing and that’s a big part of transportation advocacy, and especially when. It feels so urgent because it is what we’re up against is urgent and big when it feels so hard doing that work, as I talk about in chapter four of learning how to work well with your teams is absolutely essential because there are so many forces that are going to pressure you to have a bad time, and so you have to intentionally work to have a good time.

Does it ever end? No, and that’s a great thing. You know, a thousand years from now, there’s going to be transportation problem a thousand years from now. As long as there are people, as long as people are gathered in some form of way that makes a society. And as long as those people leave their home and transport themselves, like there will be transportation, politics, and policies.

And I find that greatly liberating as a thought of recognizing that, you know. You, the listener, like Jeff, like you’ve been doing this for 20 years now. You’ve created an army of listeners. You have all this people, you have this gigantic backlog that you built, and the fact like, wow, that is just a treasure trove.

And then you’ve done all this work recently to make that something that people can mind through. Like, that’s great. And guess what? You have more years ahead of you. Like the future’s big. I mean, maybe you’re like, no, actually this is my last podcast. Spoiler alert. but like that’s cool to think like, oh wow, this is, we get to have long-term plans and I.

I’m very much on team. It’s either happening immediately or never happens, and I’m working on remembering, object permanence. But as a trained advocate in your community, you might think, man, I really want that high speed rail. And you say, well, that’s not gonna happen today. It’s, yeah, no, duh, it’s not gonna happen today.

And it might not happen in 10 years. It might take 20 years. Okay. Make a 20 year plan. And that might sound a little silly, but. It’s not gonna happen unless people plan for it. Unless people make it happen. You’re not gonna like wake up and like, oh my God, there’s a tree in there like that. Some people will, it doesn’t matter.

Yeah, it doesn’t naturally happen. It’s not a naturally occurring phenomenon. People fight for it and they build it. And so recognizing that, oh, we’re allowed to make these plans. We can do this stuff and these fights. Daisy chain, oh, we started this thing talking out. Years ago, six and a half years ago or something like that, I led a fight that I lost for the bustling on the Bay Bridge.

We don’t have it. We still could have it. that is a fight that we could pick up tomorrow. And everything we’ve done in the past like that builds and the Trans Bay Coalition that like formed in part because of that fight, all the political out, all this stuff builds and recognizing that. The stuff never ends.

It just as long as you do it right, you just keep building it and keep building it. And so yeah, one day you do make yourself the jugg out of a group locally in your community of saying, okay, you lost that bike lane fight. Okay, guess what? It still needs a bike lane. Keep fighting for it. You know, maybe you change your tactics, you go a more culture fight as we talk about in chapter two to like shift things around, like they’re not gonna install an antibi lane, but even in San Francisco, for example.

There used to not be a freeway at the Embar arrows, then there was a freeway, then there was a big earthquake, and there was a big talk about should that freeway exist or not. And it came within, I believe, one vote. And now there’s not a freeway there. And so there was a part, if you were a anti-free activist in San Francisco, you felt the whole world was against you.

You totally lost. You lost everything. But time moves on and things change, and they won eventually. And, planning on an earthquake is not the best of plans in the world, but like,

And it didn’t happen until, the earthquake and more push from the earth.

You can still build power locally, and that means when things shift on the federal level or when you help shift things on the federal level, you’re like, oh, okay, well now our congress member or our senator is a lot more protran because of all the stuff that you’ve done, or is a lot more pro street safety.

So that means when there’s the next big federal fight around this stuff, that your person is not someone you have to drag kicking and screaming and to supporting it. Someone who like already supports it because of all the great work you did. And so, you know, this is something that I invite folks here who do like thinking complicated systems, like transit systems, all that stuff.

There’s a lot of systems based thinker, like politics is part of that. And you could take action by building power and working with others and making coalitions and all the things that. If you wanna win, you gotta fight. Talks about like, you know, you can make plans the last decades and that’s pretty fun.

Maybe a little more depressing. It depends on how you feel. That particular day is like, is that fun or is that depressing? But I’m on team. That’s fun. Like we already don’t have the things. So like, okay, how do we get the high speed rail built faster? What do we need to do? Because what are we gonna do?

Build it less fast because you’re agitated for it. Like that’s not, that’s not gonna happen.

You can ask your local library to pick up a copy if you’d like to get a copy for free. Lot of local libraries have been picking it up already. Then other places. Good read stuff like that. for your international listeners, it’s becoming more available internationally and I think starting February, 2026.

So keep an eye out for that. Awesome. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found? Find me@carterlavin.com. If you’re looking for training sessions or one-on-ones or workshops for your crews anywhere in the English speaking world, happy to hop on a Zoom and talk to folks through this stuff. And if you’re in the San Francisco Bay area, please join Trans Bay Coalition.

Let’s get you involved in this whole regional measure to save transit and a lot of other things too. ’cause. There’s a lot of fights that we need do, and I wanna win it. So we gotta fight.

I really appreciate that too.

Like there’s this huge ecosystem where we’re like generating all this energy this great, just like people really excited. And then we get to, I get to come in and say, cool. So hey, did you listen to any of that stuff? Cool. Like get involved. Here’s, let’s apply that now. And so, you know, to your kind. A little teasey point earlier on, like, yeah, there was a part where I just like listened to your podcast and like, oh my God, Jess, I have such a huge platform, and tell people to sign that petition.

And I was like, oh, wait, no, I’m supposed to do that. I’m supposed to step in and do that work. And so recognizing that we all have our plan in our inside outside Allyships and our big coalitions, and so thank you for all that you’ve done to help make the ground a lot more fertile. Because 20 years ago, the average person’s interest in this stuff was way, way lower.

And I appreciate all the work you’ve done to help raise consciousness around us.

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Why does this matter to us urban policy types Jeff? Well we recently interviewed Stacy about a piece she wrote in the Atlantic discussing how the Great Depression era Robinson-Patman Act hasn’t been enforced since the Reagan administration.  Robinson-Patman was passed to keep larger companies from creating disadvantages on price with smaller stores and competitors.

Lack of enforcement, Stacy argues more than anything else, has led to food deserts in our communities and forced people to transport themselves further from their neighborhoods to access big box stores that have knocked out competitors over the last 40 years.

So when a company like WalMart makes a deal with Pepsi to keep prices low at their stores only, it means more driving and collision risk, more long bus rides, more food insecurity, and more emissions. As Stacy notes, many arguments against enforcing Robinson-Patman suggest that we have all benefited from lower prices. But with all of these other impacts to our communities, I don’t believe that’s true.

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The post Lesser Known Reason Big Boxes Cause Sprawl and Food Deserts appeared first on The Overhead Wire.