As a postscript to the city budget discussion earlier today, I thought I would share a web link I found that explains the phenomenon that seems to be preventing our elected leaders from acting wisely when it comes to alternative transportation funding:
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7504 What I take away from this article is that nobody should be discouraged by getting an unfavorable outcome when engaging the city on bicycle issues. With repeated reinforcement, the currently politically impossible will become politically unavoidable. The trick as I see it is to identify which message needs to be delivered in order to push the Overton Window most rapidly in the direction of sanity. In my opinion a lot of bikies (including myself) at public hearings tend to overestimate how much of the logistics of bicycling the general public understands. In this respect, comments like those made by Thuy Pham-Remelle Jed Sanborn, the Rotarians I mentioned earlier, or even Vicki McKenna can be a great tool to use to identify the bridges of understanding we need to build for the public and our elected leaders so they can comprehend our perspective. _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list Bikies@danenet.org http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
