TLDR: Watching Not Just Bike and other urbanist YouTube videos alone isn’t going to do anything. We actually need to advocate for this in our local communities and city councils to get stuff done.
TLDR: Watching Not Just Bike and other urbanist YouTube videos alone isn’t going to do anything. We actually need to advocate for this in our local communities and city councils to get stuff done.
Very presumptuous to say he knows how systematic change actually happens. In the Netherlands public anger was definitely a factor, an extremist minority started a civil disobedience campaign that got the ball rolling.
A successful urbanist movement needs a healthy ecosystem of theories of change, with the hope that one (or a combination) of them is actually successful.
A good question to ask is: would NJB be more effective if he went into the nitty gritty of municipal politics with 0.1% the views instead of what he does now? I personally don’t think so.
There’s a book called “Change: How to Make Big Things Happen” that talks about the science behind social change. Basically, a small radical core shifts social networks by reaching about 25% saturation in other networks.
Here’s a podcast that interviews the author of the book: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-snowball-effect/
So it starts with social networks, then it expands out to action. That escalation path generally follows the salesman principal of asking people to take progressively larger actions.
But yeah, each situation is going to be different. In some cases (I’d probably say most) direct action is the most effective first step. But civic engagement can be effective in a lot of contexts. We basically need to build a movement and have people trying everything all at once, IMHO.
Edit: I also think parking reform is one of the easiest paths available to start tackling the problem. There’s already an established group focused on it, and it focuses squarely on the monetary side of things which is critical.
https://parkingreform.org/
That would be better than tweeting to Americans to just give up.
Thank you
Even if it’s 0.1% of views, I think having the resource available in a familiar/easier format to consume is beneficial.
Better to be looking at it than looking for it.