I’ve used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general “I can’t see how having transit would help”) from misc citizens and realtors who don’t want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don’t think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you’ve got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We’ve also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there’s a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities’ long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public’s success.
I know that I’m also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn’t much fun, but it’s how you get the money for a $100 mil project.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn’t a simple problem to solve. It’s a combination of government systems, managing individual’s needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You’ve got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.
I’ve been seriously considering getting a hitch and a light trailer. It would be more than sufficient for nearly everything we do, especially if it could haul a motorcycle when needed.
I have to drive a car because my city is barely traversable otherwise. I hate it. So, I’ve been working with the city council and other committees to start building a modern transit system. It can be done, but it takes motivated people to make it happen.
My recollection mostly had to do with the old way Qt was licensed, which affected how people wanted to include KDE in distros. Gnome managed to step into the void by leapfrogging other choices like CDE (way back!) and it managed to get wired into a few fast growing distros. Most notably, it was pulled into Ubuntu due to the Qt licensing on commercial distros, then many things based on Ubuntu, and here we are.
I’m sure there were other considerations about features, where Gnome had a good set of tools, but used to be lighter duty than KDE. There was also a window of time where Gnome was designed to be more touchscreen/tablet friendly while KDE stayed away from that style (good!).
Different licenses, different styles, different release times. A bit of “right place, right time, now the default” for Gnome.
I like KDE, but I’m mostly a Mint/Cinnamon user, and have been around since SunOS CDE systems, so it’s all better than that! I’ve got a couple of kids on Ubuntu/Gnome, mostly due to driver issues.
The original Anarchist Cookbook was incredibly scary to the feds. It was filled with mostly useless and dangerous (mostly to the “Anarchist”), but the name and the feelings at the end of the Vietnam war captured the public’s attention.
It was passed around mostly by Xerox machine or fax copies. By the time I saw a version in the late 80’s the one I ran into was a blurry and unreadable mess. The original author is on record saying that he had no idea what he was doing when he wrote it and that no one should follow any of the bomb making bits because he’d never made one himself.
Even with all of that, it holds a serious impact on our communal memory and social ideas. The name alone is going to live forever, even if the original text is lost to time.