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Annotated Table of Contents

If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy

By Carter Lavin

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the author’s background as an accomplished transportation advocate, and explains that rather than push a specific solution, the book is structured to help the reader get the transportation change they would like to see implemented through governmental processes. It introduces the concept that transportation issues are inherently political. Therefore changing or preserving our transportation system is a political effort. The chapter explains the stakes and enormity of the scope of work for changing the American transportation system to be one that prioritizes people over cars. It also covers why efforts to win transportation changes can be so fraught, as well as the role of political organizing, hope, and building power, in order to achieve change.

Chapter 1: Politics Isn’t a Dirty Word

Many people may be intimidated by politics or dislike it because to them, “politics” just means the struggle between political parties. However, politics is signiﬁcantly bigger than that; it is the act of people shaping each other’s lives. Our transportation system is part of this process. Even things that may seem innocuous, like parking lots, impact others and are therefore inherently political. Furthermore, cars are so dominant in the United States that reasonable things like safer streets, protected bike lane networks, and frequent transit are radical departures from our status quo. It is important for advocates to embrace this fact or else they will consistently underestimate the scale of organizing they need to do in order to win.

Because transportation decisions are made by people and impact people’s lives, it is impossible to remove politics from transportation. Thus “technical” transportation processes are political. So is the role of transportation professionals, and they have a range of options for shifting outcomes in the direction they want. They also often face pressure from elected oﬃcials to shift outcomes. Further pressure can come from people who oppose proposed changes. When one seeks to eﬀect or block change, they are an “advocate.” Whether working inside or outside of

governments, advocates for change can win in spite of opposition; subsequent chapters explain how.

The chapter includes nine examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews, and it ends with an exercise that consists of three prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

Chapter 2: Picking Your Battles and Outlining Your Campaign

In order for an advocate to turn a transportation idea into a winnable campaign, they must get specific about what they want. Advocates can learn how to turn their values and visions into clear, actionable demands. These demands can vary in size. Big demands are not inherently harder to win than smaller demands, and efforts to win big demands can set up larger wins in the future even if they lose on the first push. Small wins are valuable in their own right and can have a large cumulative effect.

Fights can also vary in their type. Advocates’ efforts can largely be categorized as shifting culture, policy, or budgets. Cultural fights can be used to shape behavior and attitudes, and they tee up policy fights. Policy fights try to shift rules and laws, as well as the rules around policymaking. Budget fights are necessary for getting governments to fund what advocates want them to fund.

How advocates go about budget fights will incite different opponents, so they should choose wisely. Whenever possible, transportation advocates should band together to fight for a larger amount of funding, rather than fight each other over scraps. Governments spend plenty of money on transportation-related issues, but that money often goes to expensive, inefficient carrelated infrastructure. Getting funding reallocated to transit, bike, and street safety improvements would make communities significantly safer and better, but if advocates want to win those funding changes, they have to fight for them. Depending on what change they want, they will need to focus their efforts on different branches of the government, including special transportation-related departments like Metropolitan Planning Organizations and transit agencies.

The chapter includes four tables and 18 examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews. It ends with an exercise that consists of ﬁve prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

Chapter 3: Understanding Your Context and Making Connections

Advocacy exists within an advocate’s unique context, which shapes their ability to make the connections that will help them win. Understanding their context can help advocates shape their advocacy to have an easier time. Transportation advocates’ context consists of all the

transportation decisions and political ﬁghts that came before them. Speciﬁcally, advocacy is shaped by political, cultural, and historical contexts. Political context is the entire ecosystem of political forces in a community. Advocates can map out their political context to better understand the decision-maker they seek to sway. Political context also shapes a community’s skill regarding technical matters – otherwise known as its technical capacity. Governments get good at what they do regularly, so their singular focus on car-based transportation means it is often easier for them to build a freeway than a high-speed rail line. However, advocates can push to improve their community’s technical capacity.

While many transportation improvements are technically easy to enact, implementing them can be culturally diﬃcult. Advocates must pay attention to their cultural context in order to win. Cultural context includes what people will think of an advocate, the advocate’s proposal, and their overall approach. With that understanding, people can shape their approach to support their advocacy. Deepening their knowledge of their community’s historical context can help advocates envision possibilities for change and help them avoid repeating mistakes of the past. Historic and ongoing systemic racism in America shows up in a myriad of ways connected to transportation, from displacement to police violence. Transportation advocacy can exacerbate or help heal those wounds.

Context signiﬁcantly shapes an advocate’s ability to connect with others, which is vital for building relationships and political power. Getting others to support a campaign requires connecting with them based on their priorities and values. This generally means viewing one’s transportation advocacy through the lens of people: people’s safety, people’s quality of life, and people’s freedom to move.

The chapter includes one ﬁgure, one box, one table, and 20 examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews. It ends with an exercise that consists of ﬁve prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

Chapter 4: You Can’t Win Alone, So Build Out a Team

In order to win, advocates need to have people on their side. This shows that their demand is popular and allies can help take on some of the work needed to win. Advocates can turn strangers into campaign supporters by creating an “ask” of them, which allows them to demonstrate support and get involved in the campaign. Advocates can then help supporters become volunteers and leaders. Part of advocacy work is building skills regarding collaborating with other leaders, helpers, and supporters. Organizational structures that advocates set up can both help or hinder a campaign. For example, a clear onboarding process can make a campaign more welcoming to new members, and decision-making processes that fail to get buy-in can turn oﬀ previously engaged volunteers.

With the right structures and people, a group can more readily take on multiple campaigns at once. When advocates delegate, empower, and train volunteers, the increased work can ﬂow to multiple people and not just the original core leadership team. Picking complementary campaigns makes it easier to wage multiple campaigns at the same time.

The chapter includes two ﬁgures and 16 examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews. It ends with an exercise that consists of ﬁve prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

Chapter 5: Win Bigger in Coalition

Forming and working in coalitions is vital for winning transportation changes. Decisionmakers, media, and the general public take demands from a coalition more seriously than from an individual group. Each coalition partner brings more people, abilities, resources, and insight into the campaign.

Advocates can identify and prioritize which potential coalition partners to reach out to based on who else stands to beneﬁt from the proposed change, and whose values align with the campaign. To overcome diﬃculties in recruiting coalition partners, people should make the campaign more worth a potential partner’s time and attention.

Coalitions can take a variety of forms along a spectrum of internal cohesion and structures. Coalition partners have unique interests and abilities, so offering them a variety of ways to contribute to the campaign helps ensure that each partner does more. Tensions within a coalition often arise from different “positionalities” among its members, which can include different lived experiences, positions in society, and viewpoints. Tensions within a coalition can be mitigated, resolved, and worked around when handled properly.

The chapter includes one table and 17 examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews. It ends with an exercise that consists of four prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

Chapter 6: Deploying an Inside/Outside Strategy

Winning transportation changes often takes pushing from inside and outside of official decision-making processes. Coordinating these efforts is called an “inside/outside strategy” or working the “inside and outside game.” A person’s or group’s status as an “insider” or “outsider” depends on how much influence they have on the official decision-making process, and how much access they have to decision-makers. For example, agency staffers are insiders who have many ways to tip the scales toward the outcomes they want within their official capacity. They can also coordinate with outside advocates in a variety of ways.

Advocates can win transportation changes by engaging with elected officials, agency staffers, and official committees that are part of governmental decision-making processes. When collaborating with an elected official’s office, advocates often do the work of a staffer. That can include drafting policy and discussing the issue with the stakeholders that an elected official is concerned about. By growing a campaign’s base of support and the coalition behind it – also known as building up the outside game – advocates can make it clear that the decision-maker will be politically safe if they do what advocates want. Strong outside support for a demand also pressures decision-makers to take it more seriously.

A strength of the inside game is that it can win changes that profoundly shape our world while staying under the radar. However, without outside advocacy to loudly amplify the demands of inside advocates, insiders can get ignored by decision-makers. At the same time, without the insiders, outsiders may miss out on key opportunities and their message may be left out of the negotiation process. Enacting an inside/outside strategy takes intentional work, and though it can be diﬃcult, it is a powerful way to win transportation changes.

The chapter includes one ﬁgure and 12 examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews. It ends with an exercise that consists of four prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

Chapter 7: Deploying Tactics to Win

To achieve a campaign’s goals and meet its needs, campaigners engage in activities known as tactics. When evaluating which tactics to use, advocates should consider the costs, beneﬁts, and outcomes of deploying the tactic. Common transportation advocacy tactics help meet campaign needs by bringing people into the eﬀort and increasing pressure on the decision-maker.

Tactics that primarily serve the purpose of bringing people into the campaign include petitioning, ﬂyering, creating a coalition sign-on letter, and online outreach. Tactics that primarily pressure decision-makers include delivering petitions and sign-on letters, and getting media attention on the issue.

Further increasing the pressure on decision-makers is called “escalation,” and can take the form of intensifying what advocates say, how they say it, and the political consequences they deal out to the decision-maker. For creating electoral consequences, tools like candidate questionnaires, donations, and directing volunteers to candidates’ campaigns can be extremely eﬀective.

At the end of an advocacy campaign, it is important for people to tell their story and organize the physical and digital assets they created so that the work they did in the ﬁrst campaign can be carried over into future eﬀorts.

The chapter includes one table, two ﬁgures, and 15 examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews. It ends with an exercise that consists of seven prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

Conclusion

When seeking to change their community, advocates also change themselves. On a personal level, advocates grow and become wiser, more skilled, and more politically strategic with each campaign. Transportation advocacy has no end, so ﬁguring out how to sustain one’s advocacy is crucial to avoid burnout, which is a problem for our movement. Before jumping into their next eﬀort, advocates should consider their capacity and motivation to continue on, the lessons they learned, and what has changed in their contexts. Ideas for new potential campaigns will likely bubble up in that process.

Winning transportation change goes far beyond any one campaign, and beyond the act of campaigning. Transportation advocacy can also include building community, providing services, educating community members about how to ride transit or bikes, hosting social rides or other fun events, putting out research reports, and more. Transportation advocacy, while hard, can be life-aﬃrming and joyful.

The world is as it is until we change it, and anyone can step up to win the changes that we need in order to make our communities better.

The conclusion includes one ﬁgure and 10 examples and quotes based on practitioner interviews. It ends with an exercise that consists of ﬁve prompts for readers to put the lessons of the chapter into practice and to build their skills.

If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight