Once satisfied with our atomic units, we assemble atoms into molecules. These are corridors that prioritize bike transportation by linking multiple atomic units in sequence. For example, a series of diverters every 2-4 blocks, that connect to a sidewalk designated as a multi-use path, that, in turn, makes it possible to overcome a challenging boundary and connect to a regional trail.

We’ve now done 10 episodes of the podcast in our quest to understand why bike transportation still isn’t possible for most people in most cities. They’ve been pretty high-level conversations about the bike movement broadly. Over the next five episodes, we’re going local. We’re going to try to learn as many things as we can about how the bike movement is doing in cities across America by talking with the folks who know those cities best – the advocates who are trying to make bike transportation a practical reality. We’re starting in Denver, where Bike Streets is based, and my guests on this episode are two advocates whose work I have a lot of admiration for, Jill Locantore, Executive Director of the Denver Streets Partnership and Rob Toftness, co-founder of the Denver Bicycle Lobby.

Avi Stopper (00:01)

Hey everyone, welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities? And how can we make it a reality? Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is truly a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? It's 2026. And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today? These aren't just freewheeling conversations. We're in search of an answer. And our best understanding of that answer is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:57)

We've now done 10 episodes of the podcast in our quest to better understand why bike transportation still isn't possible for most folks in most cities. These have been pretty high-level conversations about the bike movement broadly. So over the next handful of episodes, we're going super local. We're going to try to learn as much as we possibly can about how the bike movement is doing in cities across America by talking with the folks who know those cities best — the advocates who are trying to make transportation a practical reality for folks every day. We're starting in Denver, where Bike Streets is based. And my guests on this episode are two advocates whose work I have a lot of admiration for. Jill Locantore is the executive director of Denver Streets Partnership, and Rob Toftness is a co-founder of the Denver Bicycle Lobby.

Rob Toftness (01:49)

Thanks for having us.

Jill Locantore (01:50)

Thanks, Avi.

Avi Stopper (01:50)

Okay. So I want to start by probing a little bit on the different roles that different groups play in a rich advocacy ecosystem. And I think that's a cool thing that we have going on in Denver. So Jill, how do you describe Denver Streets Partnership to people who aren't tuned into urbanist stuff? What do you tell someone at a cocktail party who has no idea what any of this is all about?

Jill Locantore (02:17)

My elevator pitch for the uninitiated is we're a grassroots organization trying to make it easier to get around Denver without a car — which means making it easier to walk, or bike, or take transit, or basically do anything other than drive where you're trying to get to on a daily basis.

Avi Stopper (02:33)

I think I once heard that a good elevator pitch is concise and invites a question. And the question is often, "Okay, well, what does that mean? How do you do that?" So how do you answer that second-order question?

Jill Locantore (02:46)

Well, the problem — the reason most people have to drive — is because we've designed our communities in a way that forces them to drive without providing them any real alternative. It's either unsafe or inconvenient or just impractical to try to get around any other way. And so we are advocating for the city to invest money, adopt policies, and change the design of our streets to make it possible for people to choose things other than driving.

Avi Stopper (03:19)

It does seem that one of the big challenges is to invite people to imagine a future that is different from the present, because so much of the present just seems immutable — like this is the way society is organized. It's a really tricky proposition. But do you get the sense that when you talk to people in those initial conversations, they're like, "Wow, it doesn't have to be this way"?

Jill Locantore (03:43)

Lack of imagination is definitely a challenge, especially for people who've never lived or experienced anything other than car-centric communities. Sometimes if you just talk about things like Disney World — think about if you've ever been to Disney World, what did you like about it? It was very walkable and an enjoyable place to stroll around. We could do that in our cities too. We don't have to go to amusement parks to experience that.

Avi Stopper (04:12)

I heard at one point — and we'll get to Mayor Michael Hancock in a moment — that he wasn't really a bike person until the Downtown Denver Partnership took him on a trip to Copenhagen or something like that, and it was eye-opening. So maybe an experience as much as a story tells folks that it doesn't have to be this way.

Rob, over to you. I thought this was just an amazing moment. At the Life After Cars book tour stop in Denver, local television anchor Kyle Clark reported to the crowd a question he'd heard from — as he put it, and I find this term so annoying — the "heavy hitters" in town. And the question was: is the Bicycle Lobby too powerful? So what is the Denver Bicycle Lobby? And be honest — are you too powerful?

Rob Toftness (04:52)

Yes. Of course we are all-powerful and everywhere all at once. We will take every parking spot. But actually, the name is tongue-in-cheek, and that's what we've always enjoyed about it. It came from a Twitter account back in the day that was just called the Bicycle Lobby, and that was kind of their shtick — that they were all-powerful. We became the Denver wing of the Bicycle Lobby. And it's really funny because even in meetings we've now had people say, "Well, we know that you are staffed and well-funded." I'd like to show you the $20 we have in our bank account. But if people think that, I'm not going to correct them — why would we?

Avi Stopper (05:34)

You do have a bank account, yes? There are a couple of things that are, I think, amusingly subversive in the way that you present — one of which is that your various social media handles are @noquish. So what's that all about? And how did you get into this whole thing? What was the experience or set of experiences that got you on this train?

Rob Toftness (05:52)

@noquish was just the state of being I desired — I just didn't want to get hit by a driver when I was going from A to B. I thought that was pretty reasonable. I was actually working in Boulder. I had moved down to Denver and was making that commute. I grew up in Northern Colorado, and we drove a lot — lived out in the county, grew up driving — but I just recognized that I was getting angry as I was doing so. And eventually I found a job closer to home. The one moment I really remember: I got on my bike, strapped a lawn chair to my back, and rode to City Park Jazz from downtown Denver. And it was just kind of like that light-bulb moment — like, holy crap, this was easy. You wind your way through all the cars piled up in the park, and then you get there and it's nice and you enjoy yourself.

And then I started just riding more. I'd go to the grocery store, which was a couple blocks away, and then go a little further, and a little further. And you see paint and you're like, "Hey, this is really cool — they made a space for me." And then you get close to a pass and you go, "Hey, this isn't that great. This could be better." And then you travel a little and you see something else and you go, "Wow." It's just a learning experience as you go along.

Avi Stopper (06:56)

May there be many more who follow that path. Jill, was there any moment you can point to in particular where you were like, "Aha — yes, this is the future I see, this is the work I want to do"?

Jill Locantore (07:23)

Yeah. So I grew up in Colorado Springs, which is a very car-oriented city. And everybody, as soon as they turn 16, is excited to get their driver's license so that they have freedom of mobility. But when I went to graduate school, I moved to Toronto to go to the University of Toronto. And I couldn't figure out how to afford bringing a car with me because I had an enormous amount of student debt from my undergraduate degree — I was living on some tiny little stipend as a research and teaching assistant. And so I sort of blithely made the decision: I'll just leave my car behind and see if I can figure out how to live without a car in Toronto.

The good news is Toronto is a great place to live without a car. It has an amazing public transit system, a fantastic network of little greenways that connect to and from the transit stops, and these really dense, walkable neighborhoods where you have everything you need within 15 minutes — grocery stores, hardware stores. And I realized that happened not by accident, but that somebody at some point had made decisions about how to design the city and what type of infrastructure to invest in that allowed me, as a pretty low-income person, to have a really great quality of life. And I was like, I want to help make those decisions — I want other people to have the option to live in these great communities and not be chained to a car. And that led me into the field of urban planning and eventually into advocacy.

Avi Stopper (09:00)

I really like the framing you led with there — freedom of mobility. And I think that's not necessarily something people are super conscious of, and yet there are all these decisions that were made on our behalf by people who came before us. In Toronto, some of those are beneficial from a standpoint of access and freedom. In places like Denver and other American cities, it's not the case. And I think that at its essence, this is a battle to try to increase the general freedom that people have to go places they want to go and get there the way they want to get there.

When we think about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts in broader advocacy, I see the Denver Bicycle Lobby and Denver Streets Partnership as being a little bit of yin and yang — having a very complementary set of capabilities and roles within the ecosystem. Rob, starting with you: how do you think about what your role is, and how you play off some of the other advocacy work — in particular what the Streets Partnership does?

Rob Toftness (10:04)

Well, first of all, I think we're incredibly lucky in Denver to have the groups that we do. Some cities maybe have just one large organization. We're lucky enough to have Denver Streets Partnership, where, if there's an event that needs chairs and an insurance certificate, we can go to them for that kind of help. And we can also maybe do some things they can't — sneak around and plunk down cones, do some tactical urbanism, be a bit more antagonistic or a bit more nimble. The great thing is, Jill has called us up and said, "Hey, we have this event, can you get people to show up?" And that's one of our superpowers — yes, we can grab people and mobilize them pretty quickly.

Avi Stopper (10:49)

Jill, from your perspective, how do you see the complementary nature of that?

Jill Locantore (10:53)

Yeah. I think advocacy exists on a spectrum — from one end, a fully inside game where advocates are staff who work for the city and want the same outcomes we do, trying to achieve that within the confines of being a city employee; to the other extreme, the bomb-throwers who can be extremely critical and antagonistic toward the city. They have a role too in really pushing the Overton window in a certain direction.

I think Denver Streets Partnership and Denver Bicycle Lobby fall at different points along that spectrum — not at those extremes, but at different places. Denver Streets Partnership tries to always start with a collaborative approach with city officials, maintain good working relationships with staff and elected members of city council and the mayor's office. We will be critical when the time comes for it, but we also try to maintain that professional relationship. Whereas the Denver Bicycle Lobby can be a little more rogue and not always be so concerned about following the rules — which can be really helpful at certain times.

Avi Stopper (12:09)

It is really interesting to think about the advocacy spectrum running the gamut and including folks inside government, because we all know people who work for the local Department of Transportation and Infrastructure who really share the vision of what this city can become. There is always this interesting tension between both building connections and relationships with those folks and also nudging them along.

So, Jill — how do you think about that duality? We'll get to this in a moment in a little more detail, but Denver Streets Partnership gave the current mayor, Mike Johnston, a D on transportation. That's a pretty strong statement. But by the same token, I think you work really carefully and assiduously to create relationships and bridges between your work and the city.

Jill Locantore (13:01)

Yeah. Like I said, it always does start collaboratively, and communication is a really key part of that. We always try to have open communication with our city leaders, and it starts when they're running for office. When Mayor Johnston was running for office, we communicated with him, did a candidate questionnaire to ask him about his stance on these different issues, and then made it very clear that our intention was to hold him accountable to what he said he was going to do as a candidate, and that we were here ready to partner with him to help him achieve those goals.

And then when he started falling short of those goals, we didn't immediately jump to giving him a public bad grade. We started with internal conversations: "We're concerned about the direction things are going." It's when you start seeing those conversations not leading anywhere that you move toward: "Now is the time to be publicly critical." But even then, we gave them a heads-up — "Hey, we're going to release a report card and it's probably not going to give you a good grade, and we just want to make sure you're not caught by surprise so you can be prepared to respond however you see fit." That's part of continuing to maintain the relationship even when you get to the point of publicly criticizing folks.

Avi Stopper (14:28)

Something tells me, Rob, that if DBL were to put out a statement like that, it wouldn't necessarily be run through the mayor's press office.

Rob Toftness (14:35)

No. I like what Jill said earlier about the spectrum, though, because there are folks in DBL who want to start a bike bus, and that's really wholesome. And then there are others who want to submit a CORA request and get people's emails and give them a hard time about what they've said. I do think one thing we've really leveraged pretty hard is the social media side of things. Someone called us professional shit-posters once, which was kind of funny. But it's interesting how it's evolved from being 100% antagonistic to also getting us into meetings — it's not just telling them what they're doing wrong, but also saying, "Hey, here's some improvements we want to see." And slowly that opens the door and all of a sudden you're sitting in a meeting with city engineers. There are a lot of different ways of going about it, and I think that's what's so great about having different organizations — you've got to approach it from every angle in order to get there.

Avi Stopper (15:33)

It is kind of like the full-court press. I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier — neither of you will be surprised that I'm going to spend some time here on tactical urbanism, since I'm kind of obsessed with it.

Rob, you mentioned the fly-by-night types of operations. You did this red cup thing — that was a pretty eye-catching thing for a lot of folks — where you put red solo cups along a miserable painted bike lane on, I think, a mid-size street, just to indicate to folks where there could be actual protection. Can you tell the tale of tactical urbanism in Denver and why it's not something the city does and pursues actively? Because — going back to that point from a moment ago about seeing what the future can be by going on a trip to Toronto or Copenhagen or Portland — there's this incredible power of tactical urbanism to show folks what things can actually be like. What's the story of tactical urbanism from your perspective in Denver?

Jill Locantore (16:31)

Yeah. Denver Streets Partnership and our predecessor organization, Walk Denver, are really rooted in tactical urbanism. That is essentially how we got started as an advocacy organization — looking at a single block and asking: how could this block function differently if it were oriented around people and pedestrians rather than cars? At the time, back in 2012 I think it was, we were the first ones to propose this idea of tactical urbanism to the city. They had never heard of it before, and to their credit they were relatively receptive. So we were actually able to get permits from the city to do in-street demonstrations — if we added a bulb-out at the corner, what would it look like? Or a mini traffic circle? Just using orange cones, painted tires, whatever temporary materials, to demonstrate for one day or a few days how the street could function differently.

And they were extremely effective — both in opening up people's eyes to what was possible, and in collecting data on how it changed behavior and surveys on whether people wanted things to be more permanent. A great example was a pop-up demonstration we did on West Colfax where we actually added a protected bike lane to that busy arterial street. Before the demonstration, we asked people: do you think it would be a good idea to put a bike lane on West Colfax? The vast majority said no. And then during the demonstration event, where people got to experience a planted, protected bike lane, the opposite was true — the majority were like, "Yes, I get it now. This is great. I would love for this to happen." So it was very successful in winning over hearts and minds, helping people understand what's possible, and building community support for more permanent long-term changes.

In the case of West Colfax, we continued our advocacy and went on to secure GO Bond funding for safety and pedestrian improvements on that street — not an actual bike lane, but some of the other improvements we did demonstrate, which are under construction right now.

I think to a certain extent this kind of terrified the city — the success of these tactical urbanism projects — because they were like, "If we allow the community to demonstrate something and they like it, then they're going to expect us to build it." And they were very nervous about creating an expectation they didn't feel they could always follow through on. So they started getting a lot more stingy with permits on those types of demonstration projects, and only allowing them if they already had plans and funding to implement something and we could demonstrate what was going to be built — which kind of defeats the purpose of a demonstration project. That has been super frustrating to see compared to other cities, like Atlanta, that have really embraced this model and actually provide funding and technical assistance to neighborhood groups interested in testing out street designs. It's really a matter of culture and receptivity within the local agency. And at the moment, the culture in Denver leadership is not super appreciative of grassroots, community-led demonstration projects.

Avi Stopper (20:02)

I was thinking as I was preparing for this interview about this story, which I've heard you tell before. And I realized the follow-up question I don't think I've ever asked you is: why do you think this terrifies them? Is it the backlog of new work it creates? Is it that it's outside some master planning document held by the Oracle that says this is the sequence of projects? These things seem like such clear wins for the community. I mean, remember in the Montbello neighborhood, up by the Denver airport, you did a demonstration with a stop sign that shortened the crossing — if memory serves there was a bulb-out — and it made it possible for people to cross from the neighborhood across a kind of gnarly arterial to a park. These seem like such obvious wins. What is it about having these kinds of wins, that can so clearly and qualitatively improve people's lives, that creates consternation within the city?

Rob Toftness (21:05)

I had a really interesting conversation with a city engineer once, and I asked him: "What would happen if you were to violate the MUTCD? Are they sending an army in the middle of the night? Are they going to drag you out of your bed?" And his answer was no — but they could pull funding for it. So even at the local level, I think there's a lot of fear. Part of it is litigation, but even at the structural level, they're worried about losing federal dollars or others. There's this whole framework around the whole thing that has them afraid from the outside as well.

Avi Stopper (21:44)

There are perverse incentives basically set up around it. Jill, I think the things you typically do in those demonstrations are compliant with MUTCD and NACTO standards?

Jill Locantore (21:57)

Yeah, the street designs we've demonstrated are feasible designs that could be implemented without getting crosswise of the MUTCD. Where we do run into that challenge is around the placemaking type of activities — things like street murals and decorative crosswalks. We did a number of decorative crosswalks on Colfax Avenue, got local artists to come up with designs that were very cool, everybody loved them, but those are not compliant with the MUTCD. And especially now under the Trump administration, they seem to have a vendetta against putting art in the street. So the city has stopped allowing those — we were able to get permits for them before, but now we no longer can.

There's definitely a fear of literally painting outside the lines in that regard. And funding in general is a challenge — we all know the city doesn't have nearly enough money to do all the street design changes that even they want to do, that have been identified in their own plans and documents, let alone additional ideas the community is pushing from the bottom up. I think that's part of their concern: we just don't have the capacity and resources to be responsive to all this community-driven demand. And then it's a matter of control — the culture in our Department of Transportation, and probably in others around the country, is that they want top-down control over what happens on city streets, and they get very uncomfortable giving any of that control to community groups.

Avi Stopper (23:42)

The organic nature of it might create consternation. It also occurs to me that this is potentially a way to generate a lot of enthusiasm electorally for additional funding for these types of mechanisms. If people see that these things are possible, and then there is a funding mechanism for them to vote on, that seems like it could be quite compelling — because they understand the city doesn't currently have the money to do these things, they've seen what they look like, they know they make their lives better, and here's an opportunity to vote for that.

Jill, you led an incredible campaign called Denver Deserves Sidewalks, oriented around building a network of walkable sidewalks. Denver basically has a pretty broken sidewalk network. Can you describe the vision behind this audacious effort?

Jill Locantore (24:32)

Yeah. The challenge with sidewalks is that Denver, like most cities in the US, does not actually pay for sidewalk construction or repairs. We use taxpayer dollars to build streets, fill potholes, build out water lines and sewer lines — but for whatever reason, we've always treated sidewalks as a private amenity, leaving it up to the adjacent private property owner to build and maintain them. Which turns out to be a pretty terrible way to actually build a functional network of sidewalks. You end up with patches of concrete in front of this building or that building that don't actually connect you to where you want to go.

So the challenge has always been shifting responsibility for sidewalks from private property owners back to the city, and having a funding mechanism to pay for that. The idea had been kicking around in Denver for more than 20 years — let's start charging property owners a fee that creates a pool of funds to build and maintain sidewalks citywide. But there was just never the political will on city council or in the mayor's office to move forward with it. Politicians often underestimate how much support there is for multimodal transportation. They're kind of subject to the same car-brained propaganda that everybody is — the assumption that that's what the populace wants. So there just wasn't the political will to put this idea to the public.

In Colorado, fortunately, we have the opportunity to do a citizen-initiated ballot measure. If you gather enough petition signatures as citizens, you can get something on the ballot. And that's eventually how we were able to move this idea forward — a citizen-initiated measure that proposed a fee to fund the build-out of sidewalks, and people voted yes on it. So whether the city wants to or not, they are now responsible for building out a complete network of sidewalks in Denver.

Avi Stopper (26:37)

I stand in awe of your ability to navigate the complexities of that process. I just find it so difficult to map these things and say, okay, this is what we need to do exactly at this moment, and this is how we're going to do it, and the next step is this. So kudos to you for making that happen.

One quick follow-up: I was in New York City recently and I saw this fairly astonishing rebalancing of the right-of-way. Manhattan in particular is pretty wild. This one idea really struck me — you have tons of people walking on the sidewalks along the avenues, and in many cases they not only have protected bike lanes, but they've also taken part of the avenue itself and basically designated it as additional, quote-unquote, sidewalk space. In terms of how we think about sidewalks and accelerating the sidewalk rollout here, have out-of-the-box ideas like that been considered? We have some really unnecessarily wide streets.

Jill Locantore (27:45)

I mean, in some sense that's a form of tactical urbanism, right? If you don't have the funding available to widen the sidewalks — which can be stupidly expensive, because it starts involving stormwater management if you actually have to move the curb or change the crown of the street — a low-cost alternative could be: we just leave the curb where it is, but we commandeer existing street space and say this is for pedestrians. Until someday you have enough money to widen the sidewalk.

And if you're thinking really long-term, there's a fantastic article in a magazine called Aeon — A-E-O-N — titled "The End of Sidewalks." It makes the argument that we didn't used to need sidewalks because pedestrians were allowed to wander in the street and there weren't cars to run them over. It was the introduction of cars that forced pedestrians off to the side — literally — and we had to create a walkway that was a safe space for pedestrians. But if we can put cars back in their place and not allow them to be the dominant species overruling all of our public right-of-way, there's less of a need for sidewalks. That's a long way off — the utopia state where pedestrians rule over cars on every street. But I think we can start gradually reclaiming some streets where we're like, yeah, we allow cars into this space, but pedestrians really are the dominant users, and they're allowed to use the whole space without needing a designated sidewalk to be there.

Avi Stopper (29:30)

Of course, the king of all tactical urbanism demonstration projects — at least in my book — is Times Square. It's just fascinating to see how that has returned to what you would originally expect a public square to be. People are milling about, taking in entertainment and the sights. It's fascinating to think that these things, in some cases, have started to come full circle.

So let's turn from pedestrian activity to biking. Rob, if you were giving a state of the city address on biking — and the Denver Bicycle Lobby does designate a bicycle mayor each year, so maybe there should be a state of the city address, grand with major pomp and circumstance — chalk it up. How would you describe the current state of affairs of biking in Denver?

Rob Toftness (30:17)

I like that idea.

Rob Toftness (30:27)

I haven't recently gone and visited family elsewhere, and when you do, you always come back and realize — I do like to say this — that Denver actually is doing better than a lot of places. But when you're here and you peek behind the curtain and you're deep in the weeds for a long time, it starts to seem really dire. So on the positive side, there's a lot of really good stuff in Denver. But no doubt you also have plenty of opportunities to be in a bike lane and then end up in the middle of 8th Avenue feeling like you're going to die. There's tons of stuff in Denver that's still subpar, and we could do so much better. And I think that's the fuel for advocates — yes, we have nice stuff, but we can still do better.

Denver had a lot of really great momentum there for a while. And I think what's so disappointing right now is we have just killed it. Some of it is through straight-up incompetence and buffoonery — I don't have a better term for it. We could have just kept that momentum, and we chose not to. That's what's so frustrating about Denver right now.

Avi Stopper (31:29)

What folks should know is that there was a pretty significant mayoral transition. The previous mayor, Michael Hancock, at some point somehow came around and became a very supportive guy. A central plank in his third and final mayoral campaign was famously 125 miles of bike lanes — in what, five years I guess, even though it's a four-year term. I'm curious how you guys feel about that 125 miles. It's probably not a binary answer, but generally speaking, Jill — do you feel like that was successful?

Jill Locantore (32:07)

You know, in retrospect, I have more positive feelings about the mayor's commitment and how it was implemented than I did at the time. I have to say, People for Bikes deserves credit for incentivizing the mayor to make that commitment — they basically dangled in front of not just our mayor, but several different cities around the country: if you make this commitment to building out a significant number of bike lanes within a certain period of time, we will help support you by investing millions of dollars in marketing campaigns and public relations to help build community support for the bike lanes. And that's what got Mayor Hancock to commit. And I think just getting him to make that public commitment and really pressuring him to follow through on it is exactly why we did get a lot of new infrastructure in Denver in the last five years.

We grumbled a lot while they were building the infrastructure because we weren't super happy with the quality — we felt like it didn't quite live up to its potential of being truly high-comfort for people of all ages and abilities. We weren't super thrilled with the marketing and campaigning that was happening alongside it. But in retrospect, we did see a lot of street design changes happen during that period in Denver. It significantly expanded the bike network. No, it's not perfect. It's not high-comfort in all areas. There are gaps in connectivity. But we've seen this with your Bike Streets map — there are now a lot more routes that feel comfortable as a bicyclist in Denver than there were previously. And it is specifically because he chose this one thing to champion.

And I think that's what we're lacking with our current mayor — he has not chosen any particular thing related to transportation to champion. And so it's kind of languishing now.

Avi Stopper (34:03)

Yeah. Rob, what's your take on this?

Rob Toftness (34:14)

Yeah, I definitely agree. I think one of the key things about Hancock was — I mean, he got on a bicycle in spandex. It looked kind of goofy. He wasn't a natural bike champion. But he stayed out of the way. He said, "I want to do these bike lanes — go do them," and instructed his staff accordingly. And I remember seeing an interview where someone asked him about parking. And he didn't talk about parking. He just said, "We've made a commitment to Vision Zero and this is how we have to go about it." Again, he wasn't always the biggest bike champion, but he made a decision and he followed through on it. I have to give him that credit.

Avi Stopper (34:52)

I remember having a conversation with a pretty senior DOTI staff member who was deeply involved in a lot of the 125 miles work. The level of enthusiasm and passion he had for his work at that moment — it was as if we were putting a man on the moon. Just the level of morale was incredibly impressive. And I currently feel, in my conversations with folks, that there's a general sense of deflation. It's really interesting — having not experienced a mayoral transition before — to see how it can just stop the music on stuff like this. It's been jarring and strange.

We did a lot of work, as you know, to get our VAMOS initiative quote-unquote adopted by various city council candidates and the mayor himself. And I'm curious, as you reflect on the work during the election — Jill, you referenced a moment ago the survey you sent to mayoral candidates; the Mike Johnston survey that the Denver Bicycle Lobby had him fill out is on the homepage, I think symbolically, of the Bicycle Lobby's website. As you think about that work to understand who these folks were and what their platforms were really about, are there things you feel like you've learned where it's like, "Next time I'm not going to do that"?

Jill Locantore (36:31)

Well, I'm definitely really grateful that we did the candidate surveys while people were running for mayor, so we did have something to hold this mayor accountable to. He said this, but he did that — and we can highlight that gap. In doing so, it gives us very clear talking points that allow us to generate news coverage and engage our broader coalition of people in getting upset about the current state of affairs, and point to ways the mayor can course correct.

I think what I would do differently with future candidates is: just because they answer questions in a certain way, don't be confident that they're actually going to follow through. Bring more skepticism from the beginning of their administration. Maybe be a little more vigilant, assuming they're going to fail and therefore need to be continually pressured and educated to follow through on those commitments. Because the fact is that candidate Johnston said a lot of the right things, but we've come to realize that was probably written by campaign staffers and didn't necessarily reflect his level of understanding or commitment to these issues. Being skeptical, even when politicians say the right thing — it's great that politicians are learning to say the right thing on transportation, but we still need to be skeptical that it means they're going to follow through.

Avi Stopper (37:58)

I'm struck, looking back on it, that he knew the right language. He was able to speak in the coded language that people have come to look for if you're tuned into this. As an illustration — in that aforementioned questionnaire that the Bicycle Lobby has on the website, his first line is: "As mayor, I will work to create a connected network of high-comfort bike trails that connect our entire city, making it easier for people to get around on bike, and increase public transit usage and convenience so more and more people can take public transit and use bikes and micromobility as their last-mile solution." Rob, you're nodding as if you have that memorized word for word. Same question to you — what lessons have you learned?

Rob Toftness (38:43)

Well, it's like — yeah, it's almost like if he had access to ChatGPT at the time, that's what it would have spat out.

Avi Stopper (38:52)

Yeah, although at that point it was just talk-like-a-pirate ChatGPT, but anyhow.

Rob Toftness (38:57)

Yeah, exactly. For me, it would be vetting what they say against their past record. And that was part of the problem with Johnston — I don't know that there were a lot of transportation decisions for us to look at from his past. But there are upcoming candidates whose past behavior we do know, and I think we should definitely hold that against them. And there are others — I've seen a recent candidate website for someone where I know it was written by a staffer, because these buzzwords have gotten more popular as e-bikes came to Denver and people got on bikes and took notice. I think candidates were like, "Well, this is a part of the platform I've got to speak to."

I think instead of just asking "Do you support bike lanes?", you say, "What's the favorite bike lane you've been on in Denver? Prove to me you know what you're talking about."

Avi Stopper (39:42)

Right, and when they say MLK, you're like, "Yeah, no — I'm calling bullshit on you."

Rob Toftness (39:43)

Exactly. "I really love the Cherry Creek Trail. And only the Cherry Creek Trail." It's like, cool — have you ever left it? But really, I think we need to interrogate the knowledge, go a little deeper, because they can obviously parrot the buzzwords now. So tell me your favorite journey on a bike. Or the first question of this podcast — what was your aha moment? If they can tell me that convincingly, then I know they're not making things up.

Avi Stopper (40:10)

So Rob, one of the things I really admire about your work is — literally, I feel like you are often carrying around a copy of the city's bike master plan. And you're like, "What should we do? Here, it's in the document. It has been approved by city council. You want to know what to do? Go to page 37."

Rob Toftness (40:21)

Yes. The Denver Moves Everyone document was a big lift. And it's also frustrating to me because we're always talking about how much input we needed — and we had 10,000, 12,000 respondents to that thing. It has been vetted by Denverites. It's what they want. And the city agreed to a Vision Zero program in 2017. So we've done this over and over, and we've agreed to things. And now we have this document that was described to us as an umbrella document for our desires and priorities in transportation in Denver. We don't need to do it again. I should be able to walk up to any city council member and say, "Here it is. What part of this are we doing this year?" And that's what's so frustrating — they sometimes are so surprised: "Oh, you actually wanted us to do that?" Yes. Yes I do. Here it is. I'll print it out again and bring it to your office.

Avi Stopper (41:26)

I wonder how many times you've actually printed that out — dozens, I would imagine.

Rob Toftness (41:32)

I have spent a fair amount at FedEx Print & Ship.

Avi Stopper (41:35)

We're recording this a week after tax week. And when I think about the fact that we still have not created this reality — the literal cash that the government is pulling out of our bank accounts at this moment — it hasn't been used in the way that we say we want it. And for me, this is personal. I reflect on my kids, who are going to graduate high school without the ability to really ride their bikes all over the community. And that really pisses me off, candidly. It's just like, how long are we going to keep doing this?

So one of the things I have long wondered is how you feel the bike master plan really becomes, in practical terms, a complete network. How do we go from where we are to where we want to be — where we have this really great network that works well for people of all ages and abilities — when so many components are so complicated and need to be built independently, the process takes five years, and then, as in the case on West 29th, it's ready to go and then gets dramatically watered down to way less than what we were promised? What needs to happen to actually get this thing done?

Jill Locantore (42:56)

I mean, you used the word "process," and I think that's where there's a lot of opportunity for improvement. Our approach to transportation planning and engineering is very informed by highways — that's what we've been good at building as a country. And when you build a highway that costs a billion dollars, you do want to spend many years studying it and doing detailed engineering plans to make sure it's safe and durable. And then, because we had a habit of building highways through low-income communities, we started putting in all these checks and balances to add community planning and consultation to the process. But what we ended up with was this very bureaucratic, consultant-heavy, years-long process for building infrastructure that makes zero sense when you're applying it to sidewalks and bike lanes and traffic-calming treatments.

We don't need to spend 10 years doing engineering studies and extensive community surveying to put in a mini traffic circle. Just build the mini traffic circle — and instead of spending a ton of money doing planning and community surveying before you build it, do that afterward: make sure the traffic circle works the way it's supposed to. Are people actually slowing down? Are you seeing a reduction in crashes at that intersection? And if it's not working the way it's supposed to, go back and iterate, because it was so cheap and quick to build in the first place. It's not going to take another 10 years to fix. So I think that's where we need to see a lot of improvement — have a process that matches what we're actually trying to build today, not one rooted in our habit of building highways.

Avi Stopper (44:48)

I've never actually heard the idea framed that way — that this incredibly costly, protracted approach is sort of a derivative of the poorly-informed approach to highway construction of the past. A lot of the work that the three of us in our respective spheres have been doing is oriented around exactly this process stuff.

The younger cohort of folks within departments of transportation see this and see the opportunity, but ultimately there's a really substantial organizational culture issue they're running up against. Have you thought about how we can provide more cover for that? Maybe it's just giving us the freedom to do tactical urbanism, so people can actually see on the ground what these things look like and become believers in the possibility that their streets are going to get better. What do you think is the real work to get Denver in particular to improve its processes?

Jill Locantore (45:48)

Well, you used an important word: "giving cover." That's what we do for the city officials who are moving swiftly to implement projects and taking an iterative approach. And the real challenge is that people love to complain, but if you're neutral or fine about something — or even if you're happy about something — you're much less likely to reach out to your elected official and say, "Hey, I'm totally fine with this new traffic circle you added to my neighborhood." That really is our role: rallying people to come out and say "yes" and "thank you," and countering the naysayers who are inherently motivated to be the loudest voice in the room.

Rob Toftness (46:36)

That actually brings up another side of the advocacy thing. DBL — yes, sometimes we're there to be riled up and maybe a little antagonistic. But part of our goal was also to get people to show up to those public meetings that only the cranks show up to on a Wednesday evening. My mind was blown when I heard that city council, one time, received six emails in opposition and none in support. And I was like, that's what you based your decision on?

So sometimes you need to send that email that says, "Hey, I rode this bike lane. It was really great." Or, "I took my kid to school," or "I got some groceries." And I have to remind myself to do that. But every once in a while I've written an email and said, "I was on the Blake Street bike lane and it reminded me how great it was." Or you have someone start a bike bus, and they invite city council members and the mayor to come ride it — sharing those positive things is really valuable. Administrations turn over, but people don't. And someone who has an e-bike might be there through multiple administrations, having a better experience, and that can carry on into advocacy later. So really, showing up and saying "this is something I want" or "this was something positive" — that's just as much a part of it as saying, "Hey, you guys screwed up and need to do better."

Avi Stopper (47:56)

Thanking them when they do good work. Gosh, it's almost as if these civil servants are real people with emotions.

Rob Toftness (48:03)

Well, so many of them that every one of us here has met — you see them around town on their bikes, you know, dogfooding, riding in the lanes, and they want to do it too. They're caught up in the machine as well. I've told the story to the guy who engineered the Blake and Market lanes: I used to ride in the middle of Blake, just middle of the street, and my partner wouldn't come with me. And now we'll go out to dinner and we're using that lane. I told him that story, and I know it really meant something to him. That's really cool to be able to share.

Avi Stopper (48:35)

Testimonials — we need more and more of them. The bike bus phenomenon is such an incredible, vivid set of testimonials, because the storytelling it produces, the imagery — it is truly the essence of joy, of freedom, of kids who represent innocence and the future being out there just enjoying the right-of-way the way we all hope it will be enjoyed someday.

All right. So, lightning round to wrap up: a couple of hard-won lessons. And maybe we did a little bit of this a moment ago, but Jill, starting with you — a couple of lessons about advocacy that are your North Star.

Jill Locantore (49:19)

Well, I think an important lesson for the mobility advocacy community in particular — since we are relatively young as an advocacy movement — is to learn from those who came before us advocating for things like civil rights: the arc of change is pretty long. And when you're trying to change systems and culture, which is exactly what we're trying to do, it's going to take time and there are going to be setbacks. So it's important to learn to be patient and take that long view — even when you have setbacks, that doesn't mean you've totally lost and should take your toys and go home. Imagine if back in the 1960s, when people first encountered opposition to the idea that women and people of color should have the same rights as white men, they had just given up because they didn't win immediately. We can make really big wins and really big changes over time. It does take persistence, there are going to be setbacks, and that's okay. We need to take time to mourn and recover from those setbacks — but keep going. We are going to see change happen over time, just like civil rights advocates of the past did.

Avi Stopper (50:33)

We lick our wounds and we go to the urbanist happy hour. Rob, how about you? Hard-won lessons.

Rob Toftness (50:39)

Something that DBL has shown me is that a lot of folks think, "Hey, I want to make some change. Maybe I'm going to start a group. Maybe I'm going to register an LLC or make a nonprofit, or build all this stuff up front." And quite frankly, just put it out on social media that you're going to meet at a brewery somewhere, see if any bike people show up, and just start — little tiny steps, do things. It's really easy to get discouraged and be like, "Well, I can't do that, I don't know how to get that permit or whatever." But take the really small step first and find a group of like-minded people. And then you're going to find in that group someone who does know that thing — someone who wants to start a bike bus, or someone who wants to issue CORA requests. You're not doing it all alone. Instead of trying to front-load all the work and set it all in place and organize it all up front, just go do it. Go to a brewery or coffee shop, invite bike people, and see what happens.

Avi Stopper (51:31)

I love that — a bias for action. It's what we seek from the cities themselves. So guys, thanks so much for the conversation, for your collaboration, lo these many years. Go and make things better around here.

Rob Toftness (51:36)

Excellent. Thanks, Avi.

Jill Locantore (51:43)

Cheers to that.

Avi Stopper (51:44)

Thanks for listening. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for guests you'd like to hear from, drop us a line at [email protected]. Bike Networks Now is a production of Bike Streets. Anyone should be able to ride a bike to any destination in their city today. You can learn more about our work at bikestreets.com.

Once we’ve deployed digital infrastructure and made it possible for people to find chill routes using the infrastructure that exists today, we turn our attention to upgrading on-the-ground reality.

The place to start is with the creation of “atomic units,” design elements that have the potential to scale. These features must:

1. Create safe, high-comfort riding environments.

2. Be low-cost so network scale is a possibility despite our limited budget.

3. Take very little time to build.

4. Be loved by neighbors for how the change improves the neighborhood.

Examples of low-cost atomic units include:

• Diverters built with signs and pre-formed concrete that prohibit “rat-running,” cut-through traffic on neighborhood streets.

• The conversion of underused sidewalks to multi-use paths.

• Pavement markings that make it easy to follow a route, especially when you have to make complex transitions, like riding from a street to a sidewalk to a park trail.

For a map to evolve, it needs a publishing mechanism that’s up to the task of illuminating a bike network years before it’s formalized.

Once a city identifies its Best Available Network, the next step is to use digital infrastructure to light it up so people can go use it now. The ramifications are incredible: within six months, any city can have a complete, navigable bike network.

My guest is Carter Lavin, author of the book “If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight” — a guide to effective transportation advocacy. Carter has worked on a wide range of transportation advocacy projects, from rail to bus service to bikeways. As co-founder of the TransBay Coalition, he helped secure a billion dollars in extra funding for transit. Rather than talking in the abstract, I'd like to explore Carter's ideas through the lens of a specific Bike Streets advocacy initiative we've been working on for years called VAMOS. So the arc of this conversation will orbit around that plan. Carter, welcome to the show. How did I do with that intro?

Avi Stopper (00:00)

Hey everyone, welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities? And how can we make it a reality?

Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is truly a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? It's 2026. And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today? These aren't just freewheeling conversations — we're in search of an answer. And our best understanding of that answer is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:56)

My guest is Carter Lavin, author of the book If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight — a guide to effective transportation advocacy. Carter has worked on a wide range of transportation advocacy projects, from rail to bus service to bikeways. As co-founder of the TransBay Coalition, he helped secure a billion dollars in extra funding for transit. Rather than talking in the abstract, I'd like to explore Carter's ideas through the lens of a specific Bike Streets advocacy initiative we've been working on for years called VAMOS. So the arc of this conversation will orbit around that plan. Carter, welcome to the show. How did I do with that intro?

Carter Lavin (01:30)

That was great, Avi. I'm so excited to chat with you. It's a great honor to be here — not just because of my advocacy work in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I helped lead the TransBay Coalition, but also because I train activists across the country. That's part of why I wrote If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight: there are so many people who know so much, who have fought so hard and learned so many lessons. It's a lot easier to win if you've learned from others.

I recognize that there are people in small communities and large communities who aren't necessarily plugged into that knowledge transfer — who can't easily ask, how did that other bike lane get built? Where did this sidewalk come from? How do you do this? So I took all these interviews, all this wisdom from people in the field, and put it into the book. It's a pretty short read. And I'm so excited to talk about VAMOS and what you all are up to.

Avi Stopper (02:34)

Congrats on the book — it's an impressive accomplishment just to birth a project like that. One of the things I'd love to start with is a project you've been involved in that exemplifies the ideas you're trying to illuminate. What's the example that comes to mind when you think, this is what people need to learn from?

Carter Lavin (02:59)

I love that. I'm going to talk about one of the smallest things I've ever done — one of the smallest victories I've ever won. There is now a bike rack inside the fare gate area of the MacArthur BART station in Oakland. It didn't used to exist. When the station was built, there was no rack there. I would bike to BART all the time, and back in the early days of Twitter — before it became such a cesspool — I started noticing how nice it would be to park my bike inside the fare gate rather than outside. So I'd take a picture of that blank area and tag the director, Rebecca Salsman, who is a bike rider herself, and just say: hey, flagging this — it would be really nice if there were a rack here.

I was positive, persistent, and pointing to both the problem and the solution. It wasn't "you're a terrible person who wants me to suffer." It was more like: the reason it's not there is because no one has said, let's put one there. She then did the work, checked with her team, and one day — from my perspective, magically — a bike rack appeared. It's still there, and there are more now.

That's one of those things where we don't win unless we push for it. Nothing inevitable is happening. Yes, there are other people who use those racks, and for them the story is simply: one day I came to work and there was a rack. That's great. But someone had to fight for it. Someone had to agitate for it. And fighting doesn't always mean being aggressive or negative. In fact, one of the best ways to fight and win people over is being extremely kind — being really nice and being persistent, because people have a million other things to do in a day. When you remind them: this is on your to-do list, this is a small thing but we still need to do it — that matters.

I think about this all the time in the world of transit and transportation. There are literally hundreds of millions of small fixes like that. They're worth winning. They make people's lives better. Maybe they're not the full high-speed rail network — fine. But there was a problem, and that problem has now been fixed.

Avi Stopper (05:19)

I like to think of those as the daily indignities of using active transportation, or any non-car-based form of transportation.

Carter Lavin (05:26)

Yes. And people like Jonathan Stahls and many of our allies are really great at highlighting what these things are. I think the role of activists and organizers is to transfer our pain — our daily indignity — into political pain or annoyances for the people who have the power to solve the problem. Saying: hey, this bugs me, so you're going to get bugged. I will continue to bug you until this gets fixed. Please fix this.

Avi Stopper (05:53)

I love that framing. And it's such a great place to start. A lot of our mapping projects encounter places where slight changes make a real difference — a curb cut, for example, that lets you transition from a street to a park trail instead of having to lift your bike or ride half a block down to get to the sidewalk. These things come in all shapes and sizes.

From what I can gather, you've worked on everything from the smallest point location — a bike rack in a BART station — to really expansive projects like high-speed rail. I want to set up a little context for how our advocacy has been shaped. We've been thinking more on the expansive side: network connectivity for biking in Denver and how that can scale to other communities. I want to dive into some questions about strategy. In all candor, we have not been as effective as we'd like. We haven't yet succeeded in getting this thing built. Some introspection about what's worked and what hasn't feels important.

Carter Lavin (07:02)

That's never as comfortable as we want it to be — and that's one of the deepest truths of advocacy. No one's ever sitting there thinking, I want everything and I feel great. We are agitators. We get agitated and we agitate. But you have something you didn't have before, and now we figure out how to get stronger. I'm excited to dig in. Let's jump into the conversation.

Avi Stopper (07:33)

So, VAMOS is built on this observation: bike transportation in cities — for most people, meaning people who are not already confident riding in traffic in unprotected bike lanes — is not a practical reality until you have a complete network.

What VAMOS attempts to do is look at all the tools that currently exist in the city's toolkit and ask: how can we use these to rapidly accelerate the creation of a complete bike network in a very short period of time? Shelving this idea that a complete bike network is a 25- or 30-year generational project.

What I observe is that there are basically three main problems. One is that it just takes forever to build things. Two is that it costs a tremendous amount of money. And three is that it produces a debilitating amount of conflict. To your point about being nice, we really try to find ways to align the interests of people who want to ride bikes with neighbors and business owners — because we want those people to eventually become the people who are riding bikes.

VAMOS is the idea we developed over a few years for how Denver can create a complete, high-comfort network in one to three years for about $5 million. That's the version 1.0 network — a product that evolves bit by bit over time.

In the last mayoral campaign, we had the mayor himself and eight out of thirteen winning city council members make this essentially part of their transportation platform. That's the election. After the election, we have not made as much progress as we'd like. With that context in mind, how would you think about structuring an advocacy campaign like this?

Carter Lavin (09:27)

First, I want to acknowledge what's very good and smart about the VAMOS plan. Talking about a short time period is great for a lot of reasons. One, because we are talking about urgent things. We are talking about kids dying. VAMOS is about saving lives. You wouldn't say: you know what, we should have a fire department in 20 or 30 years. You'd say: the house is on fire, we need to fix this now.

If you are not bringing urgency — persistent urgency — you cannot expect your champions in office or in state houses to be more urgent than you. They are not going to want this more than you do.

And you're marrying urgency with a big vision alongside a deep realism: okay, this isn't going to happen overnight. But it could happen overnight. COVID hit, and a lot of things happened overnight. If the Pope said he was coming to Denver and wanted to bike everywhere, VAMOS would happen overnight. Maybe two nights, three nights. There's a lot of stuff that does happen very quickly. Governments are able to move very fast when they want to. Our job is to make them want to.

Another thing I want to flag: you're talking about what tools and levers people actually have. You are not saying: hi mayor, I'd like you to demand something of the governor. You're saying: you can do this. We're not sitting around a dirty table saying someone should do the dishes. We're saying: all of us can stand up and do these dishes right now. You've very successfully identified what is within your capacity.

I want to flag this specifically because sometimes in our movement — broadly speaking, people who want good things for transportation — as I discuss in chapters two and three of the book, it can be very easy to say: governments can do this thing, therefore I want this. That's good. But if your local government doesn't have the materials or the know-how — and it takes a while to learn how to do a thing — then you need to account for that.

Your local government might say: we don't know how to install a physically protected bike lane with a proper sweeper and all the infrastructure that comes with it. And you say: okay, you have three years to figure that out. That's workable. But you're asking: what can you do in the meantime? It does not take five years to figure out how to put up a no-driving sign or a slow street sign.

So I think you've done an excellent job of acting with speed, letting that high time-sensitivity motivate you the way it motivates surgeons — not frenetic action, but methodical action — and thinking clearly about who has the power to do what.

One big thing I want to flag in response to your question about the gap between campaign promises and actual implementation: it's about setting up expectations and identifying points of intervention. For example, if you said to me, "Avi, I'm going to the grocery store," and I said, "I'd like you to get a gallon of milk," and you said okay — but then I noticed you didn't write it down, it's on me to say: write that down. If you have a shopping list and it says "get something for Carter," I need to make sure it says specifically: milk.

If you come home and I ask, "Did you get the milk?" — it's not enough to have gotten them elected. Now I'm supposed to be the little bird chirping on your shoulder, reminding them of this. You got them into office. Now your job is to stay with them.

Carter Lavin (13:11)

The book was twice as long in the first draft. Big thank-you to the people at Princeton University Press and Island Press who let me submit something twice as long, with the understanding that I'd have to cut half of it. But there was this great section from an elected official who came into office on a big wave of support around a transit project — and then in year two, she was talking to a colleague in office who said: nobody likes this transit project anymore. And she said: what do you mean? Our entire campaign apparatus, all those people. He said: yeah, but all day long he hears from the haters. He hasn't heard a single thing from our side.

And the elected official, recounting the story, said: our elected officials need a bit more memory and a bit more spine — they shouldn't need us to check in constantly. But the lesson for those of us who are not the elected official is: we have to remind them. We have to poke at them. Did you get the milk? Don't forget the milk. Hey, I see you're going to the grocery store — are you going to the one that has the milk? It is on us to be positively persistent. There are a million things happening in government that we don't know about. Governments are complicated entities.

Someone with the best of intentions — even if you, Avi, were the mayor of Denver tomorrow — would discover that you are not given a suite of buttons and levers and a big instruction manual. You're just told: you're a city council member. You pass laws. Maybe you set a budget. Here are five laws not to break.

Avi Stopper (14:50)

So, ex post facto — after the election — I'm curious to hear your take on some of the work we've done to try to get VAMOS implemented. The election was in 2023. I talked to a number of the city council members who had supported it. I talked to the mayor's office and the Department of Transportation. The plan was always conceived as starting with some tactical urbanism proofs of concept.

I have been trying for years to get the city to allow me to place twelve traffic cones at a quiet residential intersection to make it even quieter. One could of course go do that on one's own — but what we actually need is for the city to develop the self-belief that this is something it can do. And I'd actually contend that it has happened all over town already, all the time — because construction is nothing if not a series of demonstration projects.

But we got city council members to support this. We got what seemed like a receptive audience at the Department of Transportation and the mayor's office. And it still hasn't happened. The idea was that VAMOS — as a big, expansive, complete-network vision — would start small with the most minute proof of concept, helping the city build the institutional capacity to make the broader network possible.

Is that a naive strategy? It seems so simple and small, so aligned with their campaign promises, and so limited in terms of risk. We're not talking about spending a huge amount of money. This was literally a two-hour demonstration project. What's your take?

Carter Lavin (16:47)

One thing I'm not hearing in this story so far is: we asked them to vote on this thing on this specific date. We asked them to tell this specific person to do this specific thing on this specific date.

You don't need an elected official to give you a thumbs up and say, "Yeah, man, I love what you're talking about." You need them to do very specific things. As I discuss in chapters two, three, and six on working with elected officials: they need to physically do something. They need to put ink on paper or type something in. There are very specific actions required. And it's on us to make sure those actions are actually happening — not just collecting a general endorsement of the concept.

The milk analogy again: are you going to the grocery store? What is that next step? And I hold them to every single step. I'll be honest, I have two very different minds about this — is this a respectful or disrespectful way to treat local politicians? On a good morning I land on: this is respectful. These are people with a million other things to do, and there are a lot of other people walking them through every step of their other priorities. There are only so many hours in a day. There often isn't sufficient staff — or any staff — working on these issues. So it is on us to say: hi council member, just making sure you know the subcommittee vote is coming up. Here is the specific line I need you to introduce. Thank you, I know you're so busy.

Otherwise, you're just saying: hi, can you go pass a bike policy? That's not enough. You need to be much more prescriptive than that.

Avi Stopper (18:17)

You're describing a very prescriptive approach — prescribing specific actions to decision makers. And I don't think, candidly, we've done a very good job of that. Part of it is that we don't know the process especially well. So what advice do you have for identifying where those moments are — the moment when someone is proverbially about to go to the store? How do you find those pressure points where you can say: remember me? Remember what we talked about? Here is exactly what you need to say or write in the meeting you're about to walk into?

Carter Lavin (19:00)

One thing I love about this situation — when you're trying to figure out, for example, how do I get my city to lower speed limits? Do they do that once a year? Is there a big speed limit meeting? What's the process? — is that elected officials, staffers, agency people: they're people. You can ask them.

You can say: hi, council member. Hi, random staffer. I'm here. I showed up. I want to have a conversation. I know you said you wanted this thing. I'm part of the crew trying to help make it happen. What's the next step? What's the process? When does it happen? And they might say: good question. And you say: great, who should we be asking? Who knows?

On the cones specifically: I'd like to fill out the permit to put out some cones. Where's that permit process? Who do I talk to?

And one very specific thing: you might get that answer delivered in a nice, supportive way — "great, Avi, we're on the same team, here's the thing." But you also might get it from a less-than-perfectly-enthused city staffer who says: Avi, you don't know anything about this stuff, first you've gotta do this, then you've gotta do that, I can't believe you're asking me this. And you say: cool, I'm taking notes — it sounds like step one is this, and step two is that. Thank you.

Avi Stopper (20:37)

That's where they try to drown you in bureaucratic process, right?

Carter Lavin (20:40)

Yes. And you're like: great, thank you for telling me information. Because the thing that's actually worse is when they won't tell you at all. At least when they give you the runaround, you know the process.

One thing I love about being on the activist outside-game side — which I discuss more in chapters six and seven — is that we're allowed to be annoying. What are they going to do? Not make the streets safer? Guess what: they already haven't. They already said no. So there's nothing stopping you from being like a little oil spritzer — persistent, patient, showing up. Huge love to the tactical urbanists of the world, by the way: the crosswalk painters, the bench builders, the people installing bus stop seating, the people just going ahead and doing it for their community. Because that provokes a response.

Even outside the idea of simply solving the problem yourself — which is good in its own right — it asks a question: given that one person can paint a crosswalk in a few hours, how many crosswalks should a government be able to paint in a weekend? In a year? In five years? What is our process?

You're in a great place if you can get reporters starting to ask these questions, or if you can feed questions to reporters: hey, fun fact — it's now been 100 days into this mayoral term. One of the things they campaigned on was this. Here are 12 things they could have done already and haven't done. Who wants to ask them publicly: why haven't you fulfilled these promises? Here are all the steps.

To be clear: part of that process is first laying out, here are these 12 steps, here are these buttons — we need you to push them. Sometimes politicians don't do things because there isn't a giant "make bike lane" button. The problem is not that they're not hitting the button. The button doesn't exist yet. We have to help them make it exist.

Avi Stopper (22:33)

I like that — the big make-bike-lane button. With VAMOS, what we're actually trying to create is the make-bike-network button. It's a big, out-of-the-box idea, especially when contrasted with the status quo approach to bikeways: a bike master plan that takes three or four years to develop, using fancy GIS tools, with a bunch of public meetings — and the plan that comes out is a 25- or 30-year plan.

What we're suggesting instead is that rather than building one bike lane at a time — which has been the historical approach — and building one bike lane at a time creates these archipelagos that don't connect, with theoretical connectivity pushed out into some future horizon, we can use tools that already exist in a recombined way to create a complete network in a very short period of time.

You referenced the Overton window, and I really like the positive use of it here. In most contexts I've heard it used, it's almost always negative — usually about how big tech is forcing us to accept more and more invasive terms of service. Can you describe the Overton window and how you see it applying to a big, out-of-the-box idea like VAMOS?

Carter Lavin (24:05)

We can use all sorts of tools and draw wisdom from many sources. The Overton window is the concept of the range of things considered reasonable in a given moment. This interview, for example — it's maybe 45 minutes to an hour. That's a reasonable amount of time. If I said I'd like it to be a 12-hour interview, you'd say: that's not happening, Carter.

Avi Stopper (24:26)

Then it would be the Joe Rogan Show.

Carter Lavin (24:27)

Exactly. But if I said: can I get an hour fifteen? You'd say: okay, that's a lot better than 12 hours — sure, we can do that. By shifting what's considered acceptable — by putting something just at the outer bound, or even slightly outside it — you get to expand what's possible.

One Overton window that our movement is broadly trying to shift is this: the acceptable number of children killed by cars is actually zero. Currently, our system implicitly accepts around 40,000 traffic deaths per year. I'm on team: that's unacceptable. We want to get to zero. We can't go lower than zero, so that's what we're fighting for. And the more we talk about Vision Zero, the more we're asserting: this is what the acceptable number is. Not "well, every five years a kid gets killed and we feel bad and study something for five years while another kid gets killed." We say: zero. Zero kids. And not zero kids in the rich neighborhoods and a different number everywhere else — zero kids, zero people.

That shifts what we're talking about. When we talk about curb cuts, when we talk about bike networks, we're saying we want people of all ages and abilities to get everywhere they need to go in their community. Not some ages. Not only the currently able-bodied. People of all ages and all abilities.

So the more that we make bigger demands — the more we say we want the full network, and we want it in three years — the more that the compromise position becomes: okay, some of the network in five years. And the absolutely critical part, especially for transportation advocacy, is: when you fight for what you're after and you get that compromise offer, you take it. You accept it. You say: great, now we have this, it's going in five years. You make sure it actually happens. And then you keep fighting for more.

That said, there's a level at which you get laughed out of the room — and the lesson people take away is not "Avi is bold and courageous," it's "Avi's being a weirdo, don't listen to him." So a wise friend of mine said: when you're looking for that line, check with your good allies to see where they think the line is. It's generally somewhere around there.

And to bring this back: you aren't the only one who wants VAMOS. The so-called "bike people" aren't the only ones who want VAMOS. There are churches, houses of worship, people with disabilities, and all sorts of groups who also want this. Checking in with them — what sounds good? What sounds reasonable? The mayor got elected, they didn't do it on day one. Are we happy with this being a day-20 thing? When should we start getting rowdy? That kind of thing.

Avi Stopper (27:25)

That brings me right to something I wanted to ask you: the broader coalition. It strikes me that one of the challenges in the transportation movement is that it's often a lot of transportation people — folks who understand the significance, who see it as the connective tissue of society, who understand that these aren't just trips but how people transact and make their lives possible. But the folks actually in these coalitions tend to be very limited to transportation advocacy circles.

I wanted to ask you specifically about how you define the word "fight." You chose a pretty pugilistic title for your book: If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight. What does it mean to fight? Who are we fighting? Who are we not fighting? And who should we be building alliances with?

Carter Lavin (28:19)

"Fighting" is the F-word. I chose it for a reason. Some people see If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight as a guide to transportation advocacy and feel a certain way about that title internally — a little uncomfortable. But mathematically, I'm right. Chapter one is entirely about getting comfortable with the idea that this is a fight. It takes work and struggle.

And who you are fighting — or fighting alongside — changes depending on what you're after. When we're talking about bike lanes or a bike network, the person who's perfectly fine with a bike lane four blocks over might feel differently about one two blocks away. That doesn't make them your mortal enemy and doesn't mean you'll never win the full thing. It means: cool, let's get the thing we do agree on to happen. Let's make that happen.

There are plenty of organizations, houses of worship, local businesses — all sorts of entities — who are happy to agree with you on one thing. And saying: let's make that one thing happen. That takes a fight. It takes reaching out. It takes doing work. There will be inherent resistance. Maybe the biggest part of that resistance is simply entropy — you're asking people to do something different, and that requires effort.

There is nothing stopping you from reaching out to a dozen organizations in your community right now and saying: hi, I'd like to make our streets safer so no kids — no people of any age, any background — get killed by cars. I've drafted a short letter. Would you sign on?

You could do that by the end of this podcast. You could draft an email and send it. The thing holding you back right now is not me, not Avi, not Exxon, not Chevron, not car culture — it's simply the fact that it's a thing to do. That's what we're fighting against, in the long run.

Avi Stopper (30:31)

I really like the framing that it's a fight because it doesn't just happen on its own. You use this great quote from Rebecca Solnit: hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It's an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

Carter Lavin (30:46)

I love Rebecca Solnit. I'm a huge fan. That quote is central to how I think about what we're doing. The point of hope is to drive action. If people read my book and then sit on their couch thinking, "I'm so glad someone else is going to do the work" — that defeats the purpose. The goal is for people to think: okay, now I know how to do this. And once you know how to do it, it becomes easier.

Right now I'm helping signature gatherers save transit in the Bay Area. Once you realize that to get a signature, you just wave to people, hold out a clipboard, say a sentence or two, and they say, yeah, I'd like there to be transit, sure I'll sign — it's very manageable. It's very easy to get in your head because we know what we're up against. And yet the person walking down the street whom you need to take a very quick action — they're not bringing all that baggage into the conversation. We are often carrying more of it than the people we're talking with.

Avi Stopper (31:46)

It's really interesting to think about this in terms of getting off the couch. We can't just sit there holding our lottery ticket. We need to be making connections. And with VAMOS, we have tried to build alliances with organizations that are not typically in the tent — business organizations, for example.

There was actually an article in the Denver Post today by a couple of local business owners arguing that a few bike lanes have ruined their businesses. And one of the really interesting things we've tried is sitting down with people you don't normally align with. A previous episode of this podcast featured Colorado's car lobbyist. He and I have had a number of genuinely interesting conversations. We don't agree on everything, of course. But we both think there's an important place in the right-of-way for alternative forms of transportation, and he is, I think, fairly supportive of the idea of a complete, connected network.

Carter Lavin (32:43)

That's great. None of these groups are monolithic. Car lobbyists listen to their members. Business associations, in theory, represent actual businesses. So if you're struggling to get the business association on board: talk to their members. If the merchants district doesn't agree with you, talk to a business there directly.

And I also want to say something in defense of the couch — for anyone listening who is having a low-grade panic attack at the concept of talking to strangers.

Avi Stopper (33:30)

Thank you for the empathy.

Carter Lavin (33:33)

You don't have to be the person who does all these things. You need to be plugged into the effort doing this. For example, something you can do from the couch: pull up the list of every business in an area, get their email addresses, draft the email, give it to a loud, talkative person, and say: here's the email, it's written out nicely — can you hit send, because I don't want to deal with the responses? That is something you could do from a couch and it genuinely helps.

Avi Stopper (34:01)

There's a role for everyone.

Carter Lavin (34:02)

There's a role for everyone. I'm not a graphic designer — I am terrible at it. I love graphic design volunteers. They make everything I say look so much more legitimate.

The book talks a lot about this: although it's very useful when an activist is multi-talented and can plug into many different things, it is also perfectly fine to say: I'm really good at being a keyboard warrior, and I'm going to go to bat in the comment sections. Personally, I'm a terrible keyboard warrior — I get too anxious. I love nothing more than when people jump into the Facebook comments and defend whatever we're working on, because I'm not doing that. I'm too busy talking to other people.

Avi Stopper (34:46)

Okay, I want to ask about building the coalition not with strange bedfellows, but with fellow transportation folks. Because transportation-minded people are pretty opinionated about where time and resources should go. With VAMOS, we've seen a lot of competing interests and potential ideas for how the city could spend its time and money. Even within transportation advocacy, building a broad coalition has been challenging.

Some things don't generate much controversy — covered bus bike racks, for instance. But when you start talking about where the bike facilities should actually go, what street the network should be on — that gets contentious. How do you bring fellow advocates into the fold when the high-level interests are aligned, but on a specific initiative there's real misalignment?

Carter Lavin (35:54)

Coalitions are inherently about misalignment. Inherently, we are talking about groups with different goals coming together for a particular purpose. So it's not about finding the misalignment — that's the easiest thing in the world to find. It's about asking: where is the alignment? And maybe the alignment is: we need our city government to be able to move faster. So we actually want more funding for a specific city department, or we want to fix a process that the fire code has made harder than it needs to be. Your mileage will vary depending on the issue.

A big part of coalition-building is recognizing that you can say: hi, I'm working on this specific thing. Who else would like this specific thing? The coalition that forms is the one that says yes to that thing. And it'll be different for every initiative. The house of worship on Main Street is probably interested in what's happening on Main Street. If they're on Chestnut Street, they might not care as much about Main. And that's totally fine.

One thing to keep in mind: this is not about getting married and bonding souls forever. It's about collaborating temporarily for a specific purpose. You're going to the grocery store, I need milk, can you grab some? Whatever our broader relationship is doesn't matter much here, except that there's basic trust that you're going to bring back what you said you would.

When thinking about coalition partners, ask: who does the mayor and council really listen to? Maybe there are three entities on that list. One of them you personally can't work with — fine. The other two, you've never talked to them. But here's the thing: everyone is a transportation person, because everyone moves throughout this world. And even if someone is fully stationary, stuff moves to them. There is no one who is free of transportation politics. They might not think of themselves that way — that's fine. There's a transportation angle to everything.

So you can say: that thing you want? I want you to have it, and here's the transportation angle that connects to it. Hey, the Denver Broncos are going to win the Super Bowl this year — when that happens, we're going to want to shut down streets for a parade. We're both on team parade-should-be-easy. Great. We celebrate more things. How do we make the street shutdown permit easier to apply for? The business association wants to do it; there's some fee attached. Let's fix that. And so now you have an opening.

Our job — as the people who really want this thing — is to make that connection, because the transportation movement is not yet at the stage where other movements are sitting around hoping transportation advocates will call them. We're the ones who have to say: hey, you're super busy, I'd love to work together on this. We're going to do most of the work. Here's the letter, here's the draft. We're going to make this as easy as possible for you.

Most advocacy is not paid work, whether it's us doing it or the people we're asking. So we're saying: hi, you're really busy, and we'd like you to do more stuff, also unpaid. The question is how much we can provide to support that ask — clarity, meaning, guidance, and ease.

I say this to our federal allies all the time. I'm happy to weigh in on things in DC and help mobilize our network. But I'm in the middle of a lot of things. So if you make something I can copy, paste, and send to our network, great. Thank you for making it easy. That's our role as activists: make it easy for other people to say yes. Just add my logo. Tell them: the Catholic Church wants kids not to be hit by cars. That lands.

Avi Stopper (40:34)

So there are different levels of involvement. One of the deepest involves an interesting alliance with the transportation agency itself — both in policy and in implementation. You refer to this as an inside-outside strategy, which is a nice way to characterize a genuinely tricky problem. You're simultaneously trying to romance and convince them to do what you want, while also critiquing them — because fundamentally you think something is very broken.

With VAMOS, we're looking at historical processes and saying we believe that the piecemeal, decades-long approach to building bikeways does not produce meaningful outcomes. Implicit in that is a critique of the way people have worked and been trained to work — people who have master's degrees in this and who remind you of that often. How do you find that balance: making noise and critiquing, while also being collaborative?

Carter Lavin (41:50)

This is why the book was twice as long as the first draft.

I want to complicate this even further, because we're not really talking about governments and departments and agencies. Those are legal fictions. They're illusions. We're talking about people. When you say "the Denver Streets program," you're talking about Janet. You're talking about Bob. And Bob doesn't like Avi, because Bob finds Avi annoying.

Okay — you are not the physical embodiment of VAMOS. If Bob doesn't like Avi, is there someone else in the VAMOS universe — maybe a coalition partner — who can talk to Bob? Who can say: hey Bob, checking in about this, and Bob says, I can't stand that Avi guy, and they say, yeah, also — so is that podcast, but here's the thing. Not everyone in the world likes me, and that's fine. I don't need everyone to like me. I need them to work with people in our movement.

Part of this is de-centering yourself. Who are the people who should actually be having these conversations? Maybe that's not you. A great friend of mine once said: sometimes you are uniquely unqualified to have a particular conversation because of your history with that person. That sentence stings, but it's true.

And recognize: people in government are part of an apparatus. If we say "we need you to be a hammer" and they're a wrench, they're going to say: my role is to do this thing. I'm the freeway-widening people. You say: it would be nice if you were the high-speed-rail people. They say: that's not my job. Sir, this is a Wendy's. So part of our job is recognizing what their role actually is and asking: can you do it this way rather than that way? And if not, fine — I'll go talk to the people who can.

As I discuss in chapter six on the inside-outside game: we as activists can do almost anything. We might even be able to build it ourselves. And one thing we have to be careful about is this: we might be in contact with a great staffer from the agency who genuinely cares — the person who shows up to meetings on their personal time. And if we're mad at the agency, we might go yell at the one person we know there. That's a terrible idea. All you teach that person is: don't show up anymore, because you'll be mean to me.

But if you say to that person: hi, we're trying to figure this out, can you help us map the process? And they say: yeah, actually, the director gets orders directly from the mayor — and elected officials are the ones ultimately responsible to us, who direct the agencies — then you've learned something important.

Agencies have some agency. They can do things. But they also have constraints. They might say: we don't want to do the VAMOS program because of legal liability. And you say: okay, so if we got a policy changed at the city or state level that addressed the legal liability around street safety, you'd be able to do this? And they might say: well, you'll never get that done. And you say: but if I had the magic wand and changed that, would it change your calculus? And they say: yes. And you say: okay, I'm going to go find that magic wand.

Part of this is recognizing that your allies inside government are embedded in a big ecosystem with a lot of things they can and cannot do — and they might not know the limits themselves. You as an activist might occasionally ask someone to do something that turns out to be illegal, and you might not know that. There's no welcome packet for advocacy. That's why I made If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight.

When it comes to working with people on the inside, a big part of that is helping them understand how to work with you. We are sometimes simultaneously their biggest fans and their biggest pain in the ass. Navigating that can be complicated.

Part of it is explicitly saying: I recognize you're doing the best you can with what you've got. That's why we're working to get you twice the budget you currently have. In the meantime, it would be really helpful if you did this specific thing — or could you tell me what the actual obstacle is? We're asking people to open up. And you need to build trust. Maybe you're not the person who builds that trust with a specific agency contact. But they don't live in a bubble — and neither do we. We've got to be in those conversations.

Avi Stopper (46:49)

In the creation of the VAMOS plan, we actually did a lot of this. We met with local Department of Transportation officials, shared the plan with them over multiple iterations, and basically asked: why can't you do this? That was the core line of inquiry — why is this not possible? And with each subsequent draft, we tried to eliminate those sources of impossibility. We essentially let them coach us through what steps we'd need to take. We haven't been particularly effective at the implementation stage, but in the creation of the plan, I feel like we really did close a lot of the holes based on their feedback. Each time they said "you can't do this because of X, Y, and Z," we came back with a solution.

So — a subtle shift in the arc of our conversation. We've been talking about policy and high-level decision making. I want to transition into implementation. You've used the term "process reform" quite a bit, and I think shifting the Overton window around how projects actually get executed is a really important part of this. I'm as interested in implementation as I am in policy, because the creation of these projects is not an end in itself. It's a means to an end: a better transportation system that's actually used in the way we want it to be used.

So — less subtle now — this is a transition from fighting to winning, to quote the title of the book. How do you think about winning?

Carter Lavin (48:22)

Eventually, you've made a great plan, you've done the work — and the answer you get back is: they look you in the eye and say, the reason this plan doesn't move forward is that if I implement it, I will get fired. The people I report to will say: don't do this. And you say: got it — so if you had permission, you'd do this? And they say: yes, but even with permission, if leadership changes and I'm still in this role, I'd get run out of town on a rail.

Okay. So you need not just permission, but a direct order from management — the people they report to — with enough political cover to make it survivable. And maybe they'll never explicitly say that to you, but that eventually becomes the real problem. They've done all they can within their flexibility. So now your job is to keep solving the problem: great, so we need the elected official to make the order. And the elected official says: we don't want to make the order because we think we'll be run out of town on a rail.

And you say: fun fact, we've now brought together every house of worship, every new American organization, every environmental group, every children's safety group. We will run you out of town on a rail if you don't act. There is no version of this where people aren't mad at you — but you want us to be the people who are happy with you. Someone is going to be pissed, either them or us. You don't want Team VAMOS to be the pissed ones.

When a mayor looks at the map, they're asking: Avi and all of Avi's friends — whether that's 200 or 2,000 — want this. The other people say they don't. Who do I want to alienate? Sometimes they decide they're okay with Avi being mad. So how do you fix that? Being more mad doesn't really help. But if you're like: do you want the Catholic Church to be mad at you? Well, no. Okay then — we've got to get the Catholic Church on your side.

And that's the core of it, as we discussed at the beginning: being right doesn't matter nearly as much as we'd like it to. If being right were enough, we'd have won everything we've wanted by now. Because we are right. It is bad when kids are killed. Violent death is bad. We are right to want to stop it. We are right that governments can move quickly when they want to. We are right to say: governments should move fast to protect people's lives.

So what? If you can't say to elected officials: this is not my problem, this is their problem — this is your problem — and generate the pressure to make that land where it needs to, then being right doesn't move the needle.

Our job is to build that pressure and place it precisely. We've made the button. We've built the thing that says: VAMOS here, click this, send this sentence to this person. We've set it all up. Now the problem is you, mayor. You are the one standing in the way. And I, the activist, am going to generate all the pressure I can pointing at you. You may decide you'll make people mad either way if you hit this button. Yes — and you're making us very mad that you're not hitting it. So which side are you on?

Avi Stopper (51:41)

I appreciate that. The mayor actually gave away the game recently with a comment that generated a lot of discussion in the transportation advocacy world — basically arguing that because a tiny fraction of the population uses these modes of transportation, why should we give them a disproportionate share of the right-of-way? Annoying in and of itself. But the point I take away from it is that the people who have his ear, and the volume of those voices making this case, needs to be much more substantial for him to actually move on it.

As we're having this conversation, I'm going through my list thinking: haven't done that well, haven't done that well, haven't done that well. So Carter Lavin — thank you so much. I got out of this exactly what I was hoping to get.

Carter Lavin (52:33)

I'm glad.

Avi Stopper (52:33)

I really appreciate your work, the book, and the conversation.

Carter Lavin (52:37)

And thank you for continuing to do the work. The work never ends. There's never a point where it's like, well, I didn't do that, I guess I can't anymore. You can do it. You've still got the rest of the day ahead of you. You've got a whole weekend. You've got years.

One thing I find so heartening about transportation advocacy — especially with the book — is that the more people who read If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight and get involved, the more people we have on our team. Could you have reached out to all those groups? Maybe not, because you were working really hard on other things. One of the big issues is that we need more people in the field, more people helping out.

So besides going and reading If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight: if you're in the Denver area, help Avi out. If you're outside the area but this resonates, you could still help out remotely. You can be on a couch anywhere and help generate lists and do outreach.

One thing I love about advocacy is that it's not like sports. If this were a football podcast and you wanted to help out the Broncos — they're struggling, maybe you want to jump on the field — that's not allowed. That's not how advocacy works. You can jump in. We want you to. If you're in the Bay Area and want to help save transit, reach out to me. If you're anywhere else: yell at your Congress member. Let's go win this.

Avi Stopper (54:00)

All right, Carter — thank you so much. And everyone: get the book, read it, and get out there in the field.

Avi Stopper (54:07)

Thanks for listening. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for guests you'd like to hear from, drop us a line at [email protected]. Bike Networks Now is a production of Bike Streets. Anyone should be able to ride a bike to any destination in their city today. You can learn more about our work at bikestreets.com.

A map is a key to unlock the world around us. And as the world around us is imperfect, and there are no direct, human-sized pneumatic tubes from A-to-B, a map is the best representation of how to navigate imperfection.

The first step cities need to take to create complete, connected high-comfort bike networks is to create a Low-Stress Bike Map. This is not a bike master plan of all the future awesomeness we’re going to build. This is a map that illuminates the ways to comfortably go places today.

It includes existing trails, protected bike lanes, and bike boulevards. And then we fill the gaps with other existing assets in the right-of-way: quiet neighborhood streets, park trails, sidewalks, and desire paths.

The point of building bike infrastructure is to get people to ride bikes. So it seems obvious that we should set straightforward goals for every project: X daily riders and an increase of Y systemwide. This is the North Star we need to guide our work and challenge us to doggedly pursue meaningful results.

But few projects have these kinds of goals. Even fewer projects are evaluated relative to goals like these after construction. And even fewer projects undergo iterative changes to make them perform better.

This is a conversation with August Ritter, Managing Director of Global Portfolio Management at The Nature Conservancy, where he oversees a 150 million dollar global conservation fund across 79 countries. In 2021, August brought me on as Entrepreneur in Residence to lead an early-stage team working on a new strategy and bring modern innovation strategies to the table.

August is a leading light in bringing modern innovation practices into big, complex organizations. And this isn’t just a widget factory. TNC is the world’s largest environmental organization.

August launched TNC’s India program – an experience that was eye-opening from an innovation standpoint; we’ll get to that in a moment – he managed TNC’s partnership with the startup incubator TechStars, and is a founder of The Agility Lab, a TNC initiative to make its conservation teams more entrepreneurial and more effective.

As August has said, conversation needs to, “do more, a lot better, and a lot faster.”

Avi Stopper (00:00)

Hey everyone, welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities? And how can we make it a reality?

Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is truly a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? It's 2026. And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today? These aren't just freewheeling conversations — we're in search of an answer. And our best understanding of that answer is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:56)

This is a conversation with my friend August Ritter, Managing Director of Global Portfolio Management at The Nature Conservancy, where he oversees a $150 million global conservation fund across 79 countries. In 2021 — full disclosure — August brought me on as an entrepreneur in residence to lead an early-stage team working on one of TNC's new strategies. It was an attempt to bring modern approaches to innovation into a big, complex organization.

August is a leading light in bringing these modern ideas about how innovation should be done into large organizations. And this isn't just a widget factory — TNC is the world's largest environmental organization. August launched TNC's India program, an experience we'll hear about in a minute that was, I think, eye-opening from an innovation standpoint. He managed TNC's partnership with the startup incubator Techstars, so he's deeply steeped in the ideas surrounding modern innovation and entrepreneurship. And he's a founder of the Agility Lab, a TNC initiative to make its conservation teams more entrepreneurial and more effective.

As August has said — and I hope I'm not misquoting you — conservation needs to do more, a lot better, and a lot faster. The same thing is true with bike transportation, and that is why I wanted to have this conversation. Organizational change is incredibly hard and important. If your work isn't producing results — in our case, getting millions of people to replace car trips with bike trips — you need to reevaluate your processes and operating model. There are few people I know who have done as much work to figure out how to implement deep, operational, entrepreneurial, organizational change as August. So with that said, how did I do?

August Ritter (02:47)

Thanks. You made me sound much more impressive than I actually am. Mission accomplished.

Avi Stopper (02:54)

Disagree. I want to start with the India story — the famous August Ritter India story. Tell me what happened when you launched this India initiative and how it led you on a personal quest to bring modern entrepreneurial practices to a global nonprofit.

August Ritter (03:14)

I've been with The Nature Conservancy going on 12 years now. In the role prior to India, I was helping manage our global board of directors, working out of TNC's worldwide headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C. And I wanted to get my hands dirty. I wanted to get my boots muddy with actual conservation work — get out of the boardroom and into the field.

So I signed up to be on the team that launched our India program. Prior to 2015, The Nature Conservancy did not operate in India, and as a global environmental nonprofit, India was obviously a must-win place. We launched that effort, I lived over there for a time — about two and a half years — helping launch our conservation efforts. We had nine different strategies that we launched across the subcontinent.

At the end of those two and a half years, my wife was having our second child and it felt like time to come back home to Denver. That's when I transitioned into the Techstars partnership.

But looking back across our portfolio of nine strategies at the end of that stint in India, what was most frustrating was that we had not made nearly as much progress as we expected. We knew we were solving complex problems and that we weren't going to have overnight wins — but we just expected to make much more progress than we actually did. And what was most frustrating was that I didn't really know why. I didn't know why we weren't making progress. It was infuriating. It felt like, well, we don't know why — let's keep doing what we're doing, maybe try something else, maybe do more.

Avi Stopper (05:03)

Was there any particular project where you were especially frustrated? Nine strategies sounds like an expansive, overwhelming workload. What was one where you were just frustrated beyond description at the lack of progress?

August Ritter (05:10)

There was this really interesting work in a city in southern India that's going through massive development. And I'll say — this was actually a different type of frustration. We were making inroads with the city planners there, with the government, with the private sector. And then we started to lose funding for one of the projects that was actually making progress. We went to a different donor that we knew was probably more interested in our urban work and asked them to continue supporting us — and that donor did not want to support that particular city. They wanted to support conservation in a different city.

So we ended up having to shut down one of the projects I was most excited about and go work somewhere else, simply because a donor was driving us there. That was probably frustrating beyond description — we were actually making entrepreneurial progress on one strategy and it got shut down.

Avi Stopper (06:14)

God forbid we actually make some entrepreneurial progress with one strategy and all of a sudden it gets shut down.

August Ritter (06:21)

Exactly — we had to pivot completely. That was probably my first experience recognizing the reality that in many nonprofits, donors are driving the strategy, not the evidence and data. The money was determining what we did rather than outcomes and results.

There was also work we were doing on the Ganga — the Ganges, as it's known in the U.S. — that was frustrating in terms of the progress we were making. It's such a gorgeous river, so important to the health and vitality of hundreds of millions of people. We just weren't making progress on the river quality and river connectivity issues — really damming issues — that we were trying to solve. We were stuck in a planning and partnership management phase that wasn't translating into any action.

Avi Stopper (07:31)

So you're trying to launch all these strategies and experiencing the frustration of an early-stage setback. There's this interesting arc in an entrepreneurial path — a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, hope, and optimism upfront, and then after a while you encounter what's often called the pit of despair. A lot of that is about results not matching the ambition.

At what point did you start to really question the operating model? And when did you start to encounter some of these more modern entrepreneurial ideas? I know you've drawn a lot of inspiration from The Lean Startup, as have I, as has a generation of entrepreneurs and founders. Describe how that arc unfolded — both the frustration with the operating model and the moment when you thought, wow, maybe there's actually a different methodology here.

August Ritter (08:36)

Great question. Let me answer that by going back to another project I was frustrated by, and frame it with a short story.

When did I start to question the operating model? I didn't question it when I was in India. There's this story of two young fish swimming through the water. They're swimming along and an older fish swims by in the opposite direction. As they pass, the older fish says, "Morning, boys — how's the water?" They keep swimming in opposite directions, and a minute later, one of the young fish turns to the other and says, "What's water?"

That was me. I was totally swimming in water. The operating model — how you work, how you do conservation — I never questioned it. It was just how things were done.

Avi Stopper (09:28)

Incredibly powerful. I'm just going to interject: in the creation of bike networks and in thinking about how active transportation needs to become a reality, there's a tremendous amount of that same dynamic. There's a lack of evaluation and consideration that the operating model itself might be fundamentally flawed. It's just how it's done — capital T, capital P, The Process. You run the process and that theoretically produces outcomes. Let's get back to your discovery of this alternate operating methodology.

August Ritter (09:56)

Yeah. And I should just note that TNC considers itself a science-based organization. So in modern entrepreneurial practices, what we're really talking about is a scientific method-based approach: you develop a hypothesis, you test it, you observe what works and what doesn't, and you iterate over and over.

Avi Stopper (10:17)

Right. So how did you start to encounter this? Was there an epiphany, or was it more of a drip-drip — bit by bit finding yourself immersed in this thing called water?

August Ritter (10:49)

Okay, so to help people understand the operating model I was living in: we have a solution called Water Funds. It's a financial mechanism that connects downstream water users — cities, industries that depend on clean water — to upstream landowners who are managing the land that affects that water quality. The Nature Conservancy helped innovate this model to create a funding mechanism linking those two groups.

So we had the solution. We spent 18 months in India looking for the places where this tool would be best suited to deploy. We'd align on a city, start reaching out to the municipality, to water users, to the industrial sector — describe this tool, see if there's interest. And what we'd find fairly quickly is that a given city had no interest in it, for a variety of reasons. I was frustrated — God, we just wasted 18 months of analysis — but I didn't really think there was a different way we could have gone about it. That's me living in water.

So then I'm moving back to Denver, excited about this new role with Techstars, and I figure I should brush up on what entrepreneurship actually is. I read books like The Lean Startup. But even then, things don't really click for me.

What really starts to click is working directly with the startup entrepreneurs that Techstars brings into their accelerators. I pair them with conservationists who are working on mission-aligned projects. And I get to see firsthand that these entrepreneurs are running circles around my colleagues at The Nature Conservancy. And I'm thinking: this is weird. My colleagues have more resources, they're better connected into these sectors, they have more expertise. So what's going on?

It wasn't really until I read Lean Impact — by a woman named Anne-Marie Chang — that things clicked. She draws this connection between The Lean Startup and the nonprofit sector, and puts a fine point on it: the entrepreneurial sector has gotten really good at navigating uncertainty. By definition, entrepreneurs are people building products and services in contexts of high uncertainty. And I thought: that's exactly what TNC conservationists are doing. They're building tools and services in contexts of high uncertainty — and yet we don't see ourselves as entrepreneurs, and we're not tapping into entrepreneurial frameworks.

One last thing on this: as this light starts to shine about how helpful entrepreneurial frameworks are for anyone navigating high degrees of uncertainty, I start to realize that entrepreneurial books have way more about the scientific model than do books on conservation planning and implementation. I actually did a word search and comparison. I looked at several startup manual-type books — Lean Startup and a few others — and then at the TNC conservation guidelines. I searched for the words "expertise" and "experiments." In the Nature Conservancy nonprofit guidelines, the ratio was 20 to one — experts over experiments. And it was completely flipped in all the startup manual books. That was wild to me: why are the entrepreneurial manuals talking far more about the scientific methodology than the science-based organization's guidelines?

Avi Stopper (15:02)

One word stands out for me: uncertainty. On the expertise-versus-experimentation question — everyone should understand that the people populating these TNC conservation teams are, in many cases, leading experts in their field. They have unique knowledge of the problem space. And that leads me to a word that I find to be very much at odds with an entrepreneurial, open-minded approach: hubris. Overconfidence based on expertise can be a real problem. In the planning and development of bike networks, it shows up as a blind belief in expertise — because you have a degree in a certain thing, or you've been doing it for X number of years.

So back to uncertainty: do you feel like folks accept that frame of reference? That we have this idea based on expertise, but there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty in terms of how to actually convert that expertise into a viable operating model that produces results?

August Ritter (16:13)

The word "hubris" is interesting because it's seen as such a negative thing. And it is. But when TNC's experts don't fully appreciate the uncertainty they're navigating, I don't think it comes primarily from hubris. It comes more from a mental model that's been built from a culture and a set of incentives that have existed for decades. Does that make sense?

Avi Stopper (16:50)

Describe what you mean by that in specific terms. What is that mental model? What are those operating procedures? How do the incentives bend behavior?

August Ritter (16:53)

I'm going to generalize here — stick with me. Charlie Munger has this great quote: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."

Avi Stopper (17:14)

I didn't know that — that is phenomenal. Incentives drive everything.

August Ritter (17:21)

And a related saying that's stuck with me comes from Zach Nees, who I worked with at Techstars and now works for The Nature Conservancy: "Follow the money." Because money is such a powerful incentive for driving how people work.

When you think about what that means for the nonprofit sector, it comes back to that story I told earlier about the donor who drove our strategic decision-making. There's this fascinating dichotomy with donors. Particularly business people who made their money through investing — they understand that high returns only come through high-risk investments. You don't get disproportionate returns without taking on real risk, and some of those bets are going to fail. They accept that.

But then they take that hat off when they sit down at the board of a nonprofit. They put on a different hat. This hat says: I want to make sure that this precious money I've worked hard for is having impact. I want the greatest possible certainty that it's going to. So I need to know that my funds will equal outcomes.

If that's the mental model donors bring to nonprofits, nonprofits feel obligated to put together a plan they have the highest possible confidence in. And if you do that for ten, fifteen years, you reach a point where you don't even fully appreciate the uncertainty you're navigating — because you're so used to what donors expect. We almost have to convince ourselves we have super-high confidence in the plan.

Avi Stopper (19:29)

Spot on. And I want to use that as a transition into a discussion about culture change, because what you're describing is fundamental to how organizational cultures operate. I see this a lot in departments of transportation — how they think about what types of outputs versus outcomes they're creating in the built environment, and how that affects people's transportation behavior.

Let me set this up as a compare and contrast. On one side: the experience you described in India — spending two years developing a strategy to maximize your confidence that you'd get it right, then having a conversation and discovering your assumptions were faulty.

On the other side: you brought me on as an entrepreneur in residence at TNC. It was a different strategy but still related to water — specifically, flooding in New York. River flooding, lake flooding, ocean flooding, all varieties related to climate change. The idea the team was working on was that certain locations prone to repeated flooding create a kind of moral hazard when the government keeps bailing them out and rebuilding. TNC could come in and essentially return those properties to their natural state, placing conservation easements on them so that when they flood, it's just nature taking its course.

I came into this team after they'd been working on it for a couple of years. What stands out most to me is maybe my first day. I came in fired up, and what we did that day was a process I call a design studio — we got the team together and tried to distill our thinking down to a single one-page service offering. One of my business school professors used to hammer on entrepreneurial teams: what are you selling? That one-pager was designed to answer that question — what is this team selling to local municipalities?

The way I set it up was: today we're going to design this sheet, and tomorrow we're going to start emailing people in these municipalities to have conversations about it. I think that really terrified a lot of people on the team — there was almost a mutiny. And I get it: one of my leadership principles is that you have to bring people along, put them in a position where they can succeed and they're bought in.

But notwithstanding the discomfort, over a couple of iterations and within about a week, we got this one-pager distilled down to something more representative of the team's fundamental organizing hypothesis. And within that same week, we were on the phone with mayors and other local officials, talking to them about this offering.

That offering evolved tremendously between each conversation based on what we were learning. We were making small edits because we understood this was an iterative process — our initial assumptions weren't going to be exactly right. Contrast that with what you described in India: a two-year process before you actually share anything with local, on-the-ground authorities.

The difference in risk management is enormous. There's a famous entrepreneurial phrase: get out of the building. We got out of the building almost immediately and discovered that many of our initial assumptions were off. And I think that's the culture change and ethos you were trying to bring into The Nature Conservancy. Is that an accurate description of where the culture had been and where you wanted to take it?

August Ritter (24:10)

Yes — that's a great summary of one really important aspect of the culture change we're trying to bring about. And it may be the most important: we have to get out of the building. We have to get evidence from the real world about what works and what doesn't. We have to be honest with ourselves about what our riskiest assumptions are, and what we can test and learn about relatively quickly.

Getting back to what I would have done differently in India: we would have picked up the phone and started calling people in different municipalities before we'd even done the assessment of where we should launch a water fund — just to learn where people actually wanted it.

But that's hard. You mostly learn what doesn't work before you know what does. And it's uncomfortable, particularly if you come from a culture that values expertise, because in these early conversations you're shining a light on what you don't know. You're asking about things you don't know. That can feel pretty vulnerable, especially with potential long-term partners.

What people don't realize is that it actually helps — it builds TNC's credibility — to be asking those questions early. We're not coming to partners with something shiny and polished and done. There's this counterintuitive dynamic where showing humble curiosity upfront actually builds our credibility as an organization.

Avi Stopper (25:45)

I like that — humble curiosity. Great framing.

Notwithstanding the logic behind this operating methodology, I think it's been really difficult to get TNC broadly to embrace it. There's a deep organizational change component. So how would you describe the lessons you've learned in terms of change management? What do you recommend for organizations that are genuinely trying to produce meaningful outcomes, but when they're honest with themselves, are creating a lot of outputs — doing a lot of stuff, spending a lot of money — without the promised outcomes actually presenting themselves in the real world?

August Ritter (26:33)

I'll flag upfront: organizational culture change is probably the component of my work where I feel least confident, and I have real regrets about not being more intentional about it earlier on. I probably came in thinking, here are models that have worked really well in entrepreneurship — they're going to work well here. Things like the Lean Canvas, a great tool used by entrepreneurs. We tried to roll it out at TNC and it fell completely flat. New tool, new terminology — it just did not work.

So I'll go back to some wisdom from Zach Nees, who talks a lot about culture change and bringing people along. He uses this analogy that may not be perfect, but I like it: treating an organization like a cancer patient receiving radiation. Too much radiation kills the patient, but you need enough to kill the cancer cells. Finding the right level of disruption that can actually penetrate the organization and have impact — that's the tricky part for innovators inside organizations.

A few things we did that I think were the right moves: we identified the well-respected influencers in the organization who already had mental models that somewhat matched this way of thinking, and we worked with them. TNC is a relationship-based organization, so people with relational capital across the organization are being watched. Focusing on getting them on board has been helpful.

Where we probably didn't do as well: the Lean Canvas mistake is one example, but more broadly we haven't nailed how to communicate with different audiences. On the adoption curve — innovators, early adopters, early majority, laggards — you need to communicate differently to each group. We focused mostly on the innovators and didn't really think about how we were speaking to the early majority. I think that's hampered our ability to make broader progress.

Avi Stopper (28:51)

In other words, there's a handful of folks — the team I joined, for example — who were frustrated with the lack of progress, encountered your work, and signed up because they wanted to accelerate. TNC is huge, a global organization with 6,000 people and state-level organizations that have a high degree of autonomy. To what extent have you found that creating small proofs of concept — beachheads within the organization — where you can point to even small successes, where a team accelerated its progress relative to peers, has that been a useful strategy?

Rather than trying to revolutionize the organization from the outset, you show bits and pieces of progress. And maybe that's how you cross the chasm and start to reach people who are just a bit less immediately receptive.

August Ritter (29:45)

Yes, I think that's right. It's really just drinking your own medicine. If you're trying to bring an entrepreneurial mindset to an organization, you don't go for the home run out of the gate. You look for the small wins that can actually prove this out and build evidence that these entrepreneurial mental models produce more progress. I think we did a good job of identifying where those early wins should come from and then supporting those teams in driving them.

Avi Stopper (30:37)

TNC being a very science-based organization — have you found that particular message resonating? The idea that this is actually a scientific method, empirically based approach to solving problems? You have all these scientists running around, and what you're essentially trying to convince them to do is take their expertise and apply the scientific method to figuring out how to produce the biggest possible real-world outcome. Does that resonate with people?

August Ritter (31:12)

It does, and I have seen it resonate. I think the challenge is then matching the scientific methodology to the consequences of decisions. If you're using lightweight data to make decisions, the appropriate level of rigor depends on the stakes involved. The higher the consequence, the more rigorous the data should be.

In a science-based organization, there tends to be a binary mental model: either we're using very little data to make low-consequence decisions, or we're running randomized control trials for the big ones. There's no in-between. The challenge has been: hey, there's a spectrum here, and we need to be applying the scientific methodology across that entire spectrum. The evidence can be lighter when we're making lower-consequence decisions that we can actually reverse once we realize something isn't working.

Avi Stopper (32:12)

That's a fair critique that any rigorous scientist might raise. To use the example I gave a moment ago: we go out and talk to the mayor of a small town in upstate New York about our offering — a way to help them with their flooding problems. And based on that conversation, we make adjustments.

But that conversation doesn't represent statistical significance. It's not an expansive data set with longitudinal understanding of outcomes. It's anecdotal — based on one person's perspective and one conversation. So there's genuine uncertainty. You can't be 100% confident that what you heard is representative of a broader reality. I can understand why that would make scientists uncomfortable.

How have you tried to address that argument? To your point from a moment ago — there's this middle ground. It's not that we have no data, which is essentially the conventional planning approach, but it's also not that we have all the data we'd ideally want. How do you navigate that strange middle ground?

August Ritter (33:52)

One framework that's been helpful is getting the people we work with to look carefully at the decisions they're making and ask: is this a one-way door decision or a two-way door decision?

Jeff Bezos made this observation: early startups almost exclusively face two-way door decisions. They can make a decision, walk through the door, implement something, realize it doesn't work, walk back through, and make a different decision. But as companies grow, there are genuine one-way door decisions — decisions where, once you've walked through, you can't easily walk back, or where the cost of reversing is so high that you need substantial upfront analysis and rigorous evidence.

What Bezos also observed is that as a company gets bigger, it starts treating two-way door decisions as if they were one-way doors. It misidentifies reversible decisions as irreversible, then pours enormous resources into analyzing what decision to make — which slows everything down and wastes resources.

So one of the things we do with teams is simply ask: what is the decision we're looking at? Is it really a one-way door, or is it a two-way door? And if it is a one-way door, is there something we can adjust to make it a two-way door? That simple model has helped people get comfortable making decisions based on lighter data, because they understand both the consequences and the reversibility.

Avi Stopper (35:28)

In my experience with that one-page service offering — going out to local officials to talk about it — that was clearly a two-way door. I have a conversation, realize some of my initial assumptions were off, make an adjustment or two, then go have the second conversation. I realize the changes I made aren't quite right, so I walk back through the door again.

That two-way door metaphor maps perfectly onto what I've been trying to do for years in Denver. I've spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the city to allow us to formally put eight traffic cones at one quiet residential intersection for two hours. The idea is to demonstrate a form of traffic calming that makes neighborhood streets more pleasant, that neighbors get behind and want to see expanded.

I acknowledge that the eight-cone demonstration project might not be perfectly designed in its initial conception. But that's the point — we can walk back through the door and try twelve cones, or change the geometry.

And it's incredibly difficult to get even the most simple real-world feedback about an idea. To your credit, you've done extremely well at convincing teams to get out of the building and challenge their assumptions — because you've seen firsthand, as you did in India, that when you don't, a lot of your assumptions turn out to be wrong.

So how do you talk to someone who's a genuine global expert in their field, who isn't totally bought into the lean startup and all this entrepreneurial framework — how do you make the case for why they should consider that this might help them advance their work?

August Ritter (37:51)

Ideally, you don't. Ideally, somebody else talks to them.

You look for the well-respected influencers in the organization who are already open to working differently, get them to be the beachheads, support their early success, and then let them be the ones talking to their peers. Skeptical experts are much more open to hearing from their peers than from someone like me, who they'd see as having an agenda — I've started this initiative, I'm trying to get them to do something I want them to do. But a peer has no agenda. They're trying to do the same work. And when that peer says, "I tried this different way of working with an entrepreneur in residence and it actually helped me solve a problem similar to yours" — suddenly I'm in a very different place.

Avi Stopper (38:21)

What you're describing is a set of internal champions who've themselves experienced a transformation in their own productivity and outcomes. And in transportation, there's a whole line of thinking — called tactical urbanism — about using fast-moving demonstration projects to evaluate whether changes to the built environment improve the experience for everyone: people walking, biking, and even driving.

The most famous example is the Times Square experiment in New York City. They closed down Broadway in Times Square — roughly twenty years ago — using orange barrels and folding lawn chairs. Hundreds of lawn chairs set out in the middle of one of the most famous intersections in the world. And what they discovered was not only a radically better experience for pedestrians, but also improved crosstown bus times. A phenomenal success on its own terms, and a radical reinvention of the operating methodology.

What's astonishing to me — and one of the things I'm desperately trying to figure out — is why hasn't that permeated departments of transportation? If you can do it in Times Square, you have to be able to do it at a random residential intersection in Denver, let alone in cities across the country. There are these proof points at the most visible intersection in the country, and yet adoption has been incredibly slow.

Do you have any insight from your experience — when you have internal champions who've found themselves unshackled and empowered, doing some of the best work of their careers, and they're talking to their peers — how do you get those peers over the line? Is that the crossing-the-chasm challenge?

August Ritter (41:20)

Yes, and I don't think we're there yet at TNC. I think we're at the front edge of the early majority, but we haven't gotten full adoption. We're still working through: what are the other barriers keeping us from fully reaching that group?

So let me try to answer the conundrum of having a beachhead success — like Times Square — and not being able to get adoption elsewhere. Has the New York City Department of Transportation been out there actively talking about this success to other municipalities? I don't know what the forums for those conversations look like, but you talking about that success is very different from somebody from the NYC DOT talking about it to their peers.

Avi Stopper (42:23)

Point very well taken. The woman who led the Department of Transportation in New York City during that time wrote a book and is widely considered one of the leading lights of modern urbanism. And one of the things I find surprising is that so many people in departments of transportation have read the book, believe it was a phenomenal success — and don't do it.

August Ritter (42:51)

But have you asked them why? I know you have, Avi.

Avi Stopper (42:56)

I have. And candidly, I don't think I really understand why. That remains one of the conundrums. The best answer I can come up with is just: that's not the process. Though it may be the case that there is a newer generation of planners and civil engineers trying to bring this in from the grassroots level — potential internal entrepreneurs. But maybe the culture in these organizations is just so ossified, and they are so risk-averse.

And yet I think you and I would both argue that the risk-averse approach is actually the risky approach. Because risk is embodied in time and money. In the built environment, we assume we'll get the engineering right — that it'll be safe — but the real risk shows up in over-budget, over-time deliveries of projects that don't work, that don't produce the outcomes we promised.

I do perceive a fair amount of frustration within departments of transportation. But the ability to bend the process is pretty limited. Maybe that's a separate conversation in itself.

August Ritter (44:13)

In those conversations, I'd particularly be interested to hear from municipalities where COVID almost created a forcing function for change — where things shifted out of necessity. I think about Salida, where they blocked off all the downtown streets to allow more pedestrian space. In Denver, they blocked off some streets as well. And in some places those changes stuck, even after COVID dissipated. In others, even though people really liked the changes, cities removed them.

What's the difference between the municipalities that kept these changes they weren't even planning on making — versus the ones that reverted? That seems like a really important question.

Avi Stopper (44:54)

As a non-transportation person, your intuition is exactly right. Those programs — Shared Streets in Denver, Open Streets in New York, Slow Streets in San Francisco — were wildly successful. They represented a radical departure from the standard operating procedure. And yet, despite those successes, they were not institutionalized into a more standard operating procedure. Almost immediately afterward, historical SOP was resuscitated as the way we do business.

I'll just note one more thing: one of the most amazing tools in the built environment is construction. Every day when you're driving, biking, or walking, you see it. Construction is a set of temporary conditions that alter behavior based on changes being made to the roadway. And I would contend that construction is inherently a demonstration tool — and not just something we do after design is finalized. Temporary conditions that are tantamount to construction can be part of the design process itself.

What I'm trying to crack is this: the tools already exist. The precedents are absolutely everywhere. This isn't Avi trying to conjure some entrepreneurial apparition — this is Times Square, Shared Streets, construction as a demonstration tool. The precedents are everywhere. What hasn't happened is collecting them into a coherent operating model that allows cities to bend the curve more consistently toward successful outcomes.

With that, I'd love to give you the last word. You have read more about entrepreneurship than almost anyone I know, including my fellow business school graduates. For folks who are well-intentioned, trying to make a real difference, and frustrated with the gap between their effort and their outcomes — what are the books, the blogs, the resources you'd most recommend?

August Ritter (47:33)

At the top of my list are definitely The Lean Startup and then Lean Impact. Reading The Lean Startup first probably helps you digest Lean Impact.

There's also a really interesting book called Mastering Uncertainty that I really liked. All of this is about uncertainty. And as is super apparent to all of us here in early 2026 with the shifts in AI, the future will only become more uncertain. Those of us equipping ourselves with tools to navigate that uncertainty are going to be set up for success.

One of my favorite newsletters is Farnam Street by Shane Parrish. He came out with a series of books called The Great Mental Models — one on systems and mathematics, one on physics, and one on general mental models. Building a toolkit of mental models that helps you solve problems across sectors is another way to prepare for that increasing uncertainty. Highly recommend that series.

Avi Stopper (48:34)

Any talks or online resources? Does Anne-Marie Chang have a TED Talk or something people could check out?

August Ritter (48:43)

She does — she's got a TED Talk that's good. I've sent it along to people because, frankly, a lot of people have a hard time getting through books these days. TED Talks and podcasts are more accessible.

Avi Stopper (48:58)

Any entrepreneurial or impact entrepreneurship podcasts you'd point people to?

August Ritter (49:04)

Shane Parrish also has a podcast called The Knowledge Project, which is great. And then — perhaps obviously — anything you can find on Charlie Munger. He was a remarkable thinker about mental models and solving problems in unique ways. RIP. A genuine wealth of wisdom.

Avi Stopper (49:26)

Truly one of the great minds of our time. August, let's leave it there — we could go on and on. Thank you so much for your work and the inspiration it provides to all of us trying to bring entrepreneurial practices into high-impact organizations. Really great to chat with you.

August Ritter (49:44)

This was a lot of fun, Avi. I really appreciate you and what you're trying to do in the world. Thank you.

Avi Stopper (49:50)

Thanks for listening. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for guests you'd like to hear from, drop us a line at [email protected]. Bike Networks Now is a production of Bike Streets. Anyone should be able to ride a bike to any destination in their city today. You can learn more about our work at bikestreets.com.

One of the most surprising qualities in exceptional innovators is an ability to carefully manage risk, which comes in the form of time and money.

This preoccupation with risk management is counterintuitive. In popular perception, entrepreneurship and innovation is about making big bets. That’s certainly one approach: OpenAI expects to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers and hardware in the next five years and doesn’t expect to be profitable before 2030.

In scenarios, however, where we’re constrained by reality and our time and money aren’t infinite, we need to carefully manage those precious resources.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book “Abundance” calls out the inability of blue cities and states over recent decades to build the stuff that voters want: housing, high-speed rail, and the medical breakthroughs we desperately need.

“Countless dollars,” they observe, “Were spent on health insurance, housing vouchers, and infrastructure without an equally energetic focus on what all that money was buying and building…It revealed a disinterest in the workings of government. Regulations were assumed to be wise. Policies were assumed to be effective. Cries that government was stifling production or innovation typically fell on deaf ears.”