Episode 27: The Problem with Public Meetings, Part 1

Sarah Goodyear: Hey everybody, there have been some developments since we recorded this episode, so please consider this part one of a two part series on public meetings.

Doug Gordon: So did you both see this—this flier that was posted around Brooklyn and made the rounds online last week or the week before?

Aaron Naparstek: The war on cars meeting?

Doug: Yes, the War on Cars meeting.

Sarah: I saw it on social media, but I didn’t actually see a copy of it. Do you have a copy of it here?

Doug: Yeah, I have the copy right here. There was a meeting advertised for last Tuesday. It showed two brownstones with a big banner that said “Preserve our Brooklyn neighborhoods. Fort Greene-Clinton Hill Town Hall on the NYC War on Cars.” It says, “First they took away traffic lanes, then gas stations. Now they’re coming for the parking.”

Sarah: Oh my God! And they didn’t …

Aaron: I assumed Sarah posted that.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: No. Yeah, this was not a viral marketing campaign for …

Sarah: No. Okay.

Aaron: This was not marketing for our own podcast?

Doug: No.

Sarah: I didn’t know that city hall was sponsoring this program.

Doug: No, this was not an official—this was not an official city hall meeting. This is not DOT. This was organized by a group of people. And I went to it. This is The War on Cars, the podcast about inappropriate analogies in the fight to reclaim streets for people.

Aaron: It wasn’t our analogy.

Sarah: Well …

Aaron: They went full Holocaust on there, you know?

Sarah: [laughs] Actually, it is our analogy, but yes.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon and I am here with my co-hosts Sarah Goodyear and Aaron Naparstek.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: As everyone knows, if you want to change your street in any way to make it better for people on bikes or put in a pedestrian plaza, all roads go through your local community board or community association, and involve some sort of public meeting. So in this episode, we are going to this important frontline in the war on cars, and we are going to discuss what happens when regular citizens gather neighbor to neighbor to discuss losing parking. And we’re gonna ask some important questions: is a better public meeting possible, or is screaming at each other in a church social hall a necessary part of the process?

Aaron: That’s democracy.

Sarah: Yeah. And another way you can engage in the public process is by supporting us on Patreon.

Doug: That’s an incredible segue.

Sarah: I know.

Doug: Thank you.

Sarah: It’s really good.

Aaron: Nice work.

Sarah: So you can just go to TheWaronCars.org, and click “Donate” and make a contribution.

Aaron: And if you go to TheWaronCars.org right now and you donate $50, the first two people to donate at the $50 level will receive a Cleverhood rain poncho for biking—awesome rain poncho for biking, awesome flak jacket for terrible community meetings.

Doug: I have one of these. It’s actually in camouflage and they’re pretty awesome. Yours will not be in camouflage. We got some great rain capes from Cleverhood, so thank you. And we’ll send those out right away.

Aaron: With stickers. With War on Cars stickers.

Sarah: That’s only available to our US subscribers.

Aaron: Yes.

Doug: Correct.

Aaron: And we just got two, so the first two people to come in at 50 bucks after this episode drops, it’s all yours.

Sarah: All right, so now that that’s out of the way …

Doug: Right. So some background on the war on cars public meeting. So this summer, the New York City Department of Transportation rolled out this residential loading zone program in about 12 neighborhoods. And it was kind of simple. Basically, we’ve got all these UPS trucks, Fedex trucks blocking roadways, and DoT said, “We’re gonna create some loading zones, we’re gonna take some parking spaces, and we’re gonna give those over to delivery trucks, to food guys, to people dropping off elderly relatives. We’re gonna manage the curb a little better.” So they decided to install new signage, not allowing any basically private parking from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm in these handful of neighborhoods.

Sarah: So that’s a great idea, but the city kind of botched the rollout, am I right?

Doug: That really kind of an understatement, actually. They really fucked it up, to be honest. So what ended up happening was that they put up these signs. There was almost no notification to the people on the local blocks. And to make things worse, within a matter of days, less than a week, I believe, they were ticketing and towing people from these spots. There was almost no grace period. And people got pissed. They were getting tickets of, like, $185, as much as $400 and up to go retrieve their cars from the tow pound.

Sarah: Yeah. And they were pissed, and that’s completely understandable.

Aaron: So taking a policy that we really need to happen, you know, loading zones, and completely turning the community against it, not explaining how it’s beneficial to people at all.

Doug: And not just turning the community against it. People in the neighborhood organized. They contacted their local city council person and other elected officials, and they got the DoT to yank the signs, restore the parking, and refund people the money they were charged for their tickets. So the program still exists in some neighborhoods, but in Fort Greene-Clinton Hill, where this war on cars flier popped up, people felt really emboldened. They had won, they beat City Hall. And that was kind of the pretext for this meeting. So the meeting begins.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, speaker: Should we start? I mean, if people probably dribbled in. Hi. Welcome everybody. Do I need the mic? No.]

Doug: There are a few opening remarks by the local city council member before she dashes off to another meeting. And then Lucy, this woman who was one of the organizers, gives an opening statement.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lucy: So anyway, tonight we would welcome everybody. And we’re here to have a respectful conversation with our neighbors about what we see happening in our residential streets. And this is a bit of context for me. This is just me. DoT, in my opinion, has taken over our streets in a way that affects our personal lives and works to dictate how we should live. They have done so without talking with those who live here and getting consent, changing our streets changed our lives.]

Sarah: It sounds like this meeting maybe wasn’t really just about loading zones, right? That there was something deeper going on here.

Aaron: I mean, “Changing our streets changed our lives” suggests that it’s about change.

Doug: Right. It was about change. And, you know, I think normally when you go to a public meeting—and we should be clear, this meeting was not organized by the city of New York. It was just organized by local people in the community. But what happens even at those meetings where people are there to discuss an actual plan presented by the city, is that they often get hijacked by people using them as a proxy for their fears about change or the things that they’re seeing in their neighborhood. And so that’s why this was kind of the perfect public meeting. We weren’t there to vote on anything, we were just there to talk about change.

Sarah: And were people able to do that respectfully, and to hear …

Aaron: Productively?

Sarah: Yeah, listen to each other, hear what each other is saying?

Doug: Remarkably, for the first 45 minutes of this meeting, people were totally respectful. They listened, they didn’t interrupt. And it was actually pretty nice, and then things took a bit of a turn.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe: Hi, I’m Joe. I don’t know if this is in this district, but I live on Bedford and Willoughby. Last year, because cars are in the city, we had, I believe, 240 people die. We had over 4,000 people that were injured so far this year alone, people outside of cars, 21 of them have been killed by cars. And so this needs to stop somewhere. And I understand rich people have apartments and they bring their cars, but if we have the parking garages, they’ll always be for rich people, on average, a parking spot at $330 a month.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lucy: What do you think they should do?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe: What do you mean? I think they shouldn’t have cars.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lucy: They shouldn’t have cars. Right. You think they should do what?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe: Get rid of their cars.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lucy: Right.]

Aaron: I mean, it sounds like Joe, you know, waited 45 minutes and listened to a lot of people speak and was respectful. And I mean, nothing he—everything he’s pointing out is factual, except for his opinion that people shouldn’t have cars, which is a little bit radical. But I kind of like the way he’s sort of, you know, moving the Overton window over a bit to say, like, “Hey, like, I’m a person at this meeting who thinks that we have too many cars in the city, and that cars are killing people and it’s a problem.”

Doug: And I think that’s a fine thing for us to do here on this podcast, I think that’s fine to do in an op-ed of a newspaper. But when you’re at a meeting where people are primed and people are saying there’s this war on cars and the cities taking space from us, you’re—you’re not going to win over a lot of converts.

Aaron: But nobody’s gonna be won over at this meeting.

Doug: No, not at all. Of course.

Aaron: So who cares? So it’s like, why not just be like, “I’m—we are in a war on cars, and I’m—I’m fighting it.”

Doug: Yeah.

Aaron: Why is that so bad?

Doug: It just—it didn’t engender any sort of openness or connectivity, community, anything like that.

Aaron: Right.

Doug: It just shut people off.

Sarah: I guess, like I say, I believe that the diplomatic corps can play a role, and I think this is a place where the diplomatic corps maybe should be deployed rather than the armed forces. I don’t think Joe sounds like he was really trying to understand why it is that people have cars, why they feel like they need cars. I don’t think that he was having a good faith conversation, and so I think actually it’s …

Aaron: I think that’s unfair to Joe. I mean, really? Like, bad faith? You think? I mean, I think he’s, like, actually trying to confront these people with, like, the damage that cars cause. I mean, you have to do that. You know, these guys are not gonna—they’re never gonna say, like, “Okay, I’m gonna give up my car.” It’s just not gonna—but so having someone in the room who’s just willing to confront the damage that cars are causing, and …

Sarah: Well, Doug, what effect did it have on the meeting? Like, did—do you feel like it advanced the conversation into a place where people were, you know, like, “Oh yeah, man, now I see why cars are bad.”

Aaron: They’re not gonna do that anyways, though, Sarah.

Sarah: Okay. What happened next? What happened next?

Doug: So what happened next is that, you know, Joe had cited all these stats about the number of people who were killed by cars and all these problems that cars are causing. And people, even though he wasn’t saying “You here in this room have killed people and you’re driving kills people,” that’s how people took it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lucy: Let’s say in the last decade or maybe 10 years ago, I lived on Vanderbilt Avenue. There were not as many bikes, okay? I rode a bike. I went over my handlebars on a bike. I still rode a bike into the city. And then in the past five years I would say, all of a sudden—which is wonderful for the environment, there’s tons of bikes. And there’s more population. So what has our city and the Department of Transportation done except for just add more bike lanes, make it more unsafe. And if you ask me, a lot of the fatalities, it’s because of city planning is not doing their job. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not necessarily on drivers who every day are extremely cautious and courteous and …]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [audience laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lucy: Yeah. I work. I work and I carry equipment around and I carry children around, and this is what I have to do to survive. And I resent that you would say that one, that I’m callous or don’t care about someone getting hurt.]

Aaron: So wait, I think that’s actually very productive. Like, Joe has sparked—Joe has helped us get to, like, an emotional core at this issue. He’s like—like, people are now responding with, like, really how they feel and in a personal way. And I don’t think that’s bad at all.

Doug: Yeah. I mean, if I had to diagnose that moment, I think that person is basically saying, “I’m a courteous, safe driver. I see that there are all these problems you’re saying that are caused by cars, but I’m not responsible for that. Why should I be punished? And why should I have the thing that I need to survive taken away for things that other people are doing?” That’s not an illegitimate way to think on her part. Yeah, but it’s a complicated—you know, we’re talking statistics versus personal narrative. And those two things don’t overlap.

Sarah: Well, I mean, I think it’s interesting that it turns it into this thing of, you know, people are very courteous when they drive. I think if you talk to most drivers in New York City, they’re not going to say, like, “Wow! One thing I love about driving in New York City is that everyone is so courteous when they’re driving.” I think a lot of drivers have a negative experience of other drivers. But what’s interesting about what Joe has done is he’s got—he’s made it about drivers versus people on bikes instead of the idea that making our streets safer and more organized is good for people who drive.

Doug: Well, I think the problem is every driver thinks they’re above average, right? Like, nobody—nobody’s gonna say, “Oh yeah, I’m a shitty driver. I’m reckless. I blow through red lights. And you’re right, Joe, drivers are causing lots of problems, but I don’t give a shit.” They’re gonna say, “I’m not like those other people. All these drivers that you say are killing people, that’s not me. And so why are you making me responsible and potentially having me give up the thing that I need to survive?”

Sarah: Right. But that’s what I’m saying is if you have the conversation in a different way, then you can say, like, “Yeah, you do need your car to carry a certain kind of equipment around. That’s true. That’s why we want to make it so that the street is better for you and for everyone else.” And, you know, instead …

Aaron: Right, so you’re starting from, like, a point of empathy with the driver who has to carry stuff.

Sarah: Exactly. And, like, shouldn’t a community meeting be about building community?

Doug: Absolutely.

Sarah: And you don’t build community by coming in and saying, “Oh, here’s all the points of difference that I have with you.” You build community by saying, “Here are the points that I have in common.” For instance, my neighbors on my block drive a car, and I see them having to double park to get their baby out of the car. And I could feel really mad at them. But you know what? I’ve known them for 15, 20 years. And instead I’m like, “Oh, I wish that they had a loading zone that they could use to do that more safely.” And if it ever came to that on my block, that’s how I would approach them. I’d say, “I see that you really need to use your car for this. Here’s how you would be safer taking your child out of the car is if there were a loading zone here.” I wouldn’t be like, “Drivers kill people. That’s why we need loading zones.”

Doug: I mean, I think part of the problem is that livable streets advocates are talking about a system of driving. The system of driving is rotten. It’s terrible for everybody, including drivers. But individual drivers don’t think that they are participating in a rotten system.

Aaron: Okay, so the point of this episode is to talk about better public meetings. And I mean, Doug, like, how was this meeting set up? How could it have been better?

Doug: Well, that was part of the problem. It was at this point in the meeting that I actually noticed that all of the, let’s say, pro-status quo people were on one side of the room and all of the livable streets advocates, the change favorable people were on the other side. There was—there were folding chairs and an aisle down the middle and a microphone set up at the front where people spoke.

Aaron: So wedding style.

Doug: Yeah, like a terrible wedding.

Sarah: Or more like a courtroom, actually.

Aaron: Yeah, right. Exactly.

Doug: Basically, yeah. With the defense and the prosecution on opposite sides of the aisle.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: Absolutely.

Aaron: Okay, so let’s go with that. It’s a courtroom, but it’s not even entirely clear what we’re prosecuting here. Because the case—the case is technically about curbside loading zones, but of course this meeting becomes about?

Doug: It becomes about bikes.

Sarah: Ah, yes.

Aaron: Bike lanes!

Doug: Yes. It becomes about bike lanes. Right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, speaker: There’s a question about the role of a bicycle now. Is a bicycle part of a trans—transportation system network? I don’t know. I doubt that it is. It’s not delivering goods and services and emergency services and everything else because you’re going to have—you know?]

Aaron: That was a little echoey, so we should just recap. He’s basically saying, “I don’t think bikes are part of a legitimate transportation system like delivery trucks and cars are.”

Sarah: Okay, this is so incredibly frustrating because the whole point of this, loading zones, was so that people could get delivery trucks to be able to park on their street, and somehow he’s managed to twist this into something about how bikes aren’t a legitimate form of transportation.

Doug: But I don’t think he’s actually, in his mind, twisted it, right? He thinks everything was fine for the 20, 30, 40, however long he’s lived in the neighborhood, for that many years. Then the bikes came along and the traffic came along. And so correlation is not causation, but in his mind it is. Things were fine, and then things started to change. And what changed? The bikes. And so I think he really sees the bikes as just kind of jamming up this system that to him was working fine for a long time. So I think that brings up the question: can we even have a conversation about how we use our streets with people who don’t see bicycles as a legitimate part of a transportation system?

Aaron: Maybe not. And maybe they just need to be defeated in the political arena, you know? Just more people who do believe bikes should be part of the transportation system need to come out to these meetings and speak up and, you know, say that they are and they should be and we should do better.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I think that you do have to use rational arguments with people like this. You know, say, “Well, how does your food delivery get to your house? Almost exclusively on a bicycle. And, you know, I got to this meeting by coming on a bicycle.” Again, this is emotional, and I think that there’s a lot of defensiveness that comes from people feeling like they’re being blamed for the ills of the world.

Aaron: Right. And well, I mean, and this—also, this is a kind of like trench warfare that’s happening at these community meetings. I mean, it’s a real kind of like hand-to-hand combat where people with very differing worldviews are just struggling with each other in a room together. And as someone who’s, like, participated in these meetings for, like, 15 years now—and I don’t so much anymore—I just wonder how productive it is at this point to even engage with this. Like, what if we were just operating—like, we need to find a way to operate on a higher policy level than this.

Doug: I think the problem is is that we’re not even speaking the same language. And that came up. So this woman named Blythe gets up, and she’s actually one of the best speakers of the night. She’s very calm, very rational. And she called the organizers out first for their flier.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Blythe: You know, you pulled together this meeting, and I think presented the idea that—or today you’ve said this is about bringing together community voices and trying to figure out what we think, we as a community. Of course, I think that’s a bit disingenuous when on the flier to advertise this, it equated car owners to Holocaust victims. Here’s what I’m saying is I think it’s great for people to have their opinions. I think it’s great for people to have their point of view. I think it’s fine for you to own a car. I don’t think that we should be using our public spaces for you to have free storage of your car.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP:  [applause]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: That language is offensive. It’s offensive to use that. I park my car, I store my bicycle. Period.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I pay taxes!]*

Doug: Right. So in case it wasn’t clear, she was talking about how it’s not necessarily okay for us to use public space for people to store their cars, and she got immediately kind of shut down by people saying—one man in particular saying that word was offensive. “Car storage” is offensive.

Aaron: Car storage is offensive?

Doug: That language is offensive. Yeah. And then he said, “I park my car, I store my bicycle. Period.”

Aaron: We gotta drill down into this because this is deep. There’s something going on here.

Doug: Well it gets back to—it gets back to a little bit about what we were talking about before, which is that cars are seen as legitimate occupants of road space and bicycles are not. You can bring your bicycle up into your apartment. You can store it there. But I need to park my car because I’m going to need to use it to do important things.

Sarah: And I’m gonna need to use it on a regular basis. I’m gonna need to—you know, I think that there’s this idea that if you’re storing something, you’re not using it regularly, you’re not—whereas he’s saying, “My car is part of my flow of life and I’m just parking it temporarily while I—while I do other things, and then I’m gonna come back to it.”

Doug: Yeah. You’re storing your bicycle because maybe you get it out to go for a ride in the park on the weekends, but you’re parking your car because you’re going grocery shopping three times a week, and you are driving to see an elderly relative. You need easy access.

Aaron: Right. But don’t you get—it’s fascinating, though, that the guy took it so personally.

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron: Like, this language is offensive. It was almost like he’s like, “You know, I am not a car-storing American. I am a parking American.”

Sarah: Well, and also …

Aaron: Like, it was like almost part of his identity.

Doug: Oh, it was fundamental to who he was.

Aaron: Yeah. He used the language of identity to say he was offended by this.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think, you know, that—that gets down to something, which is that people’s cars are part of their identity, right? And they’re—they show status, they show the ability to move about freely in society, and that for a lot of people, cars are a symbol of a certain kind of American lifestyle that is aspirational. And having a car, especially a nice car, it says, “I’ve achieved something, I’ve arrived.” And I think that that’s one reason that people get so very emotional about this.

Doug: I think the other thing that I noticed—and this came up at other parts of the meeting—was that there was this idea that we used to call it parking, and now everyone is trying to make us call it car storage. And you folks, the bike advocates, are part of this big conspiracy, a well-funded conspiracy, the bike lobby. And you have marketers and you have advertisers and you have consultants, and you’re changing our language.

Aaron: Yeah.

Doug: And language is identity. Language is culture. And if you change the language, what’s next? And so I think that’s part of what he was reacting to. You’ve changed something fundamental to how I even talk about this stuff.

Aaron: There’s something about that term then, car storage, that kind of forces these guys to think about it differently, and in a way that makes them uncomfortable and even personally offended. And to me, that suggests that maybe that’s a good term to use in meetings to start calling this “car storage.”

Doug: And in that sense, I thought that’s where Blythe was actually kind of more genius than Joe, because Joe was saying something that nobody could really agree on, and people don’t want to hear that they’re bad drivers. But she really was kind of pushing the Overton window of how we talk about this stuff in a way that, like you said, got that visceral reaction and hopefully can push it just a little farther for next time. So I thought it was kind of a brilliant move.

Sarah: Well, and it really exposed how much this is a part of a larger thing that is often called, you know, “the culture wars,” right? And—and one of the aspects of culture wars is language and, you know, “political correctness,” quote-unquote, and calling things by different names. And I think that that’s—you know, we’ve advocated for a long time to use the word “crash” instead of “accident.” We’ve advocated for a long time to have in a headline, “The driver killed someone,” not “The car killed someone.”

Doug: Right.

Sarah: And people get very, very upset when they do have to use different language—whether it be pronouns or car storage. And, you know …

Aaron: And to be clear, like, I don’t think—you know, I don’t think the goal is to, like, just trigger the car owners, but these words make people think differently about cars and driving and the transportation system. And clearly, like, calling it car storage makes people think, “Huh. Right. Like, I am just storing a gigantic piece of personal property for free on the public street.”

Doug: And to broaden it out beyond this particular public meeting, in a way you’re not even talking to the person that you’re talking to in the church social hall. You’re talking to the press that’s covering that thing.

Aaron: Or a policymaker.

Doug: Or the policymakers who are sitting in the back of a public meeting listening. Or the random person who’s kind of on the fence and doesn’t really know how to think and starts to, like you said, think about this differently.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, speaker: So we need to—we do need to wrap it up. Are there any last comments that haven’t been said?]

Doug: So basically at this point, we are an hour and 45 minutes into the meeting. It’s pretty long. It goes on for almost an hour after that, and actually it was kind of respectful from that point out. There were a lot of sort of, “Can’t we all just get along” speeches where people really were almost upset at the level of acrimony, not in the room, but sort of out there in the general discourse. And then it kind of just petered out and ended.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I mean, I think it’s very productive to hear everybody’s words. I hope it was.]

Doug: So I guess all of that leads us to really the question we asked at the beginning of this episode: is a better public meeting possible? What would that look like?

Sarah: Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the room is set up and the way the meeting is set up, and what kind of expectations that creates. And my kid went to a Montessori school for many years, and in Montessori education, one of the—one of the main principles is preparing the room, and setting up a room so that when kids go into it, there’s a way of exploring, there are things to do, and they can move independently around the room in a way that’s productive and interesting and engaging and meaningful and instructive. And I think that this kind of confrontational situation can be defused just by the design of the room.

Aaron: So a big—a big problem that a lot of these community meetings have is that people aren’t talking about the same thing, and they’re not talking about the same thing because what they are talking about is just some proposal on paper or some idea. And I find it really helps when you have photo renderings of a changed street, or you actually have a project that has taken place in some temporary form. And the community can actually discuss the thing that has happened, or even go out on the street and talk about changes together that they want to see happen.

Aaron: And we’ve done meetings like those in the past in New York City, and they’ve been really productive.

Doug: I mean, I think one of the things I thought about while I was at that meeting actually was, wouldn’t this be more productive if we were walking around the neighborhood and pointing to the double parking and the blocked bike lanes, and looking at a street with 60 parking spots on it and zero space for pedestrians or cyclists and saying, “This is your war on cars?” Right? “This is what you’re saying is bad?” And being able to have those discussions while looking at something, instead of it being this sort of NIMBY black hole into which everyone can pour their fears about change, and their own—their own mortality.

Sarah: Right.

Aaron: It’s like right there. The street is right there. All you have to do is get out of the church basement, go walk up on the sidewalk and start talking about the—sort of the changes that you see or the changes that you want.

Doug: Now I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that there’s a fundamental unfairness of community meetings, and that is they require people with time to participate in them. And not everybody has that. People don’t have flexible schedules. This meeting was supposed to begin at 6:00 pm on a Tuesday night. Not very many people can leave work in order to make it.

Aaron: Well, that’s why these meetings are dominated by retirees.

Sarah: I think regardless of when the meetings happen, one of the most important things that you get when you go out into the environment instead of staying in the basement is the sense that you’re all part of a team who are working on something together, and that you’re working on something. And I think that people build community when they work on something together.

Aaron: Right.

Sarah: And if you go out into the environment and it’s prepared in the proper way, then you’re gonna have that feeling of agency. And that relieves some of people’s fears, and then that makes them less defensive and that makes meetings more productive.

Aaron: I mean, having individuals go up to a microphone and present to a room, and half of that room agrees with them and half of that room disagrees with them, sometimes vehemently, first of all, that’s a terrifying thing for the speaker. It’s not easy to do. It’s not easy to do well. And it’s also not very productive. It’s performance. It’s theater, it’s not really any kind of working together.

Doug: So one of the things I noticed was that as the meeting ended and people were putting away chairs, there were, like, little breakout conversations that people were having. And I spoke to somebody about how that happened.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Doug: What I’ve been asking people is that this wasn’t your typical community meeting in that there was no proposal from the city, nothing from DoT about a bike lane or a bike share station or a road diet in any sense. It was just a forum. What do you think it accomplished?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Um, that—nothing. [laughs] I mean, I think maybe it accomplished—you know what? Actually, after the forum was over, you know, I kind of was listening to other people talking, and it seemed like those small, independent conversations were a lot more productive and civil. Not that it was like a, you know, WWE fight out there. But these small conversations where people got together seemed to be really nice. So even if it was three hours of just yelling, at least at the end, you know, I shook hands and met some people who disagree with me. And we thanked each other for our opinions. You know, even though the DoT doesn’t hear those conversations, it felt nice to just connect on an individual level to those community members.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Doug: So maybe the lesson is that the meeting should start at the end with everybody leaving?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yeah. Yeah, something like that. I mean, there wasn’t a …]

Sarah: Yeah, it’s too bad you can’t—you can’t have the end without having the meeting first. [laughs]

Doug: Yeah. It almost seems like this is how the sausage gets made. It’s just a necessary part of the process, perhaps.

Aaron: Right. Well, you know, it’s like, maybe you just have to have the fight before you can have the make-up sex.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: [laughs] And scene.

Sarah: Thanks for listening to The War on Cars. Remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, because that is how people find us. Write us with any comments, suggestions or complaints at TheWaronCars(@)gmail.com.

Doug: We’d like to thank our top sponsors, including Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, the law office of Vaccaro and White in New York City. Huck and Elizabeth Phiney, Lee H. Herman, Jr. and Timothy Buck. And also thanks to Lucy Cotine and Shelly Hagan for being so open to having The War on Cars record the war on cars. Does that make—does that make sense, what I just said?

Aaron: Yeah, I think so.

Doug: Okay, thanks.

Aaron: This episode was recorded and directed by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. It was edited by Jamie Kaiser. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our logo is by Dani Finkel of Crucial D Designs. I am Aaron Naparstek.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Doug: And I’m Doug Gordon, and this is The War on Cars.