From the Inside: What I Learned Watching Transport Advocacy Fail
Key Takeaways
- A major obstacle to good transport policy is often the advocacy itself. Here are 8 solutions to common mistakes:
- Write for the decision-maker, not yourself: a strong executive summary and human stories that resonate emotionally will get your report read; jargon-heavy technical detail alone won't.
- Good policy ideas die without a viable political path, so if your idea is politically difficult, your job is to help decision-makers see how to make it politically possible.
- Advocacy that calls for more spending without identifying where the money comes from is far less effective than advocacy paired with a credible funding source.
- When advocacy stalls, diagnose why (politics, trade-offs, framing, weak mobilisation) rather than assuming the idea failed and simply moving on to the next one.
- Bring in genuine transport expertise before advocating for a policy, and be willing to drop your preferred idea if it turns out to be bad policy.
- A brilliant strategy is worthless without a mechanism to track implementation and hold agencies accountable when practice drifts from policy.
- Compromise and incremental wins are how progress actually happens, so reflexively opposing imperfect progress can leave you worse off than accepting it.
- Transport reform outlasts single governments, so advocacy organisations that only know how to work one side of politics lose influence every time power changes hands.
What Next?
Are you struggling with some transport policy advocacy and could do with some help? Email me at russell@transportlc.org.
Introduction
Every year, worthwhile transport advocacy fails in the same avoidable ways. A good idea gets buried in a report nobody reads past page two. An interesting policy gets killed because nobody bothered to work out the politics. A once-in-a-blue-moon reform gets voted down by the very people who should support it, because it wasn't perfect enough. I've watched this happen many times, and it's rarely because the underlying policy was wrong.
I've seen transport advocacy from every angle: as an elected politician making the final call, as a political advisor and public servant shaping what reaches the decision-maker's desk, and as an advocate myself, pushing for change through think tanks and peak bodies. That vantage point has taught me that advocacy mistakes are a very common problem.
This blog lays out eight mistakes I see again and again, from poorly written reports to failing to persist after the first setback. None of them are unique to transport, but I've watched them derail transport reform specifically, often taking genuinely good ideas down with them. I hope that by naming these mistakes clearly, advocates can start avoiding them, and more good transport policy can actually make it into the world.
One caveat before I start: this is advice for engaging with decision-makers, not public servants. The two audiences respond to very different approaches, and conflating them is often a mistake in itself.
Mistake 1 - Poorly written reports
Decision-makers and their advisors are busy people. Lengthy reports land on their desks constantly, and many never get read past the first page. If you want yours to be the exception, fix these three common problems.
The executive summary has to do the selling. No longer than one page, it should be the strongest possible case for your advocacy, written from the decision-maker's perspective rather than yours. Advocates instinctively lead with what they find most important, not what the decision-maker will find most important.
Technical rigour alone won't move anyone. I've read plenty of solid, well-researched reports that landed with a thud, because they never got past the head and into the gut. Pair your evidence with human stories that make the case emotionally as well as intellectually. This works best when the people in those stories resemble people the decision-maker cares about, such as their constituents, or reflect their own experience, because that's when the story resonates rather than just decorating the page.
Write everything for your audience. Cut the jargon; a decision-maker's advisor shouldn't need a glossary to get through page one. And be careful with framing: a progressive case for reform will land badly with a conservative decision-maker no matter how sound the underlying policy is, and vice versa. Tailoring your argument to the values of the person you're trying to convince is about understanding your audience.
Get the exec summary, the emotional pitch, and the framing right, and you've cleared the first and most common hurdles. Many advocacy reports never do.
Mistake 2 - Ignoring the politics
When I was both a politician and a political advisor, the operating philosophy was simple: work out the right policy first, then figure out how to make the politics work. It's a philosophy Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, echoes in his book on political leadership: good policy comes first, and the politics gets built around it, not the other way around.
Whenever a policy idea landed on my desk that I thought was genuinely right, my job was to find a way to make it politically viable. Unfortunately, in my experience, most politicians and their staff don't operate this way. Unless an idea comes with a clear, low-risk political path already attached, it gets dismissed outright, no matter how good the underlying policy is. If you're advocating for something that's politically difficult, doing the political groundwork is essential.
This is usually the point where someone brings up the Overton Window, the range of ideas the public currently finds acceptable, and argues you either have to stay inside it or wait for it to shift. I'm not a fan of how this concept gets used in practice. Too often it becomes an excuse for inaction. The history of reform tells a different story: the most effective politicians don't wait for the Overton Window to move; they move it. If your idea currently sits outside the mainstream, your job isn't to shelve it; it's to help decision-makers see how to shift the window far enough to fit it in.
The other political dimension that gets consistently overlooked is the government's own strategy, especially where an advocacy organisation is politically opposed to the government of the day. Too many organisations spend their energy attacking a position the government has already firmly committed to, a fight they are never going to win. That energy is almost always better spent finding the adjacent opportunities that don't require the government to reverse itself. If a government won't touch road space to add bike lanes, would it back funding for cycling to school instead, or upgrades to existing cycle lanes that don't provoke a fight with drivers? Progress on the edges of a government's position usually beats a head-on collision with the centre of it.
Mistake 3 - Ignoring the trade-offs
I've read a lot of advocacy documents over the years, and most gloss over the one challenge every politician has to grapple with: trade-offs.
This shows up most clearly around public spending. Most transport advocacy calls for spending more money, whether that's very low or free fares, or better services. But politicians have to find that money from somewhere. Advocacy is far more effective when it comes paired with a clear source of funding. New York's congestion pricing campaign is a good example: it was really two pieces of advocacy running together, one for the congestion zone itself and one for increased subway funding. That combination is what made it work, bringing together people who wanted a better subway with people who cared about congestion, with plenty of overlap between the two. If subway advocates had simply campaigned for more money without pointing to where it would come from, the campaign would likely have gone nowhere.
Transport decision-makers are under a particular funding squeeze right now. The public's priorities generally sit elsewhere: the economy and cost of living, health, education, defence, and welfare almost always rank above transport. On top of that, there's a steady pull toward popular but poor transport policy, as the public looks for short-term cost relief, like fuel tax cuts. The result is that money for genuinely good transport policy keeps getting squeezed from both directions.
This is why I find advocacy for free or heavily discounted fares, paired with major service investment, so naive. In the vast majority of places, you will not get both, and given the short-term political appeal, free or cheap fares usually wins. The trade-off that actually gets made is cutting maintenance spending to fund the fare cuts: a short-sighted move that costs more down the line.
There's also a trade-off in priorities that advocates too often skip past. Your policy is competing against every other policy being advocated for, and government can't fund them all. If you want yours to win, you need a clear answer for why it should be prioritised over the alternatives. Sometimes that answer is built in: a policy that affects a marginal seat (or better, several) will often get prioritised on its own merits. Absent that, you need another argument, and "this matters" isn't one; you have to make the case for why it matters more.
Good advocacy doesn't ignore trade-offs. It comes with answers.
Mistake 4 - A failure to persist
There's a cycle I see play out again and again: an organisation writes an advocacy report, holds a few meetings with ministers and stakeholders about it, and when the policy doesn't get taken forward, moves on to the next idea.
Buried in that cycle is an unspoken assumption: that the policy stalled because the idea itself didn't resonate. In my experience, that assumption is usually wrong, and it's a convenient one, because it lets the advocate off the hook. The harder, more useful question is why it actually didn't land. Did you solve the political problem? Did you understand the trade-offs? Was the report too technical, or the exec summary too weak to get anyone past the first page? Could you have done more to mobilise the stakeholders who might have carried it forward? Many setbacks have a specific, fixable cause. Few advocates actually stop to find it.
Advocates who succeed over time treat advocacy as a continuous improvement cycle rather than a series of one-shot attempts. A setback isn't a verdict on the idea; it's data. The response isn't to abandon the policy and pursue the next one; it's to diagnose what went wrong, fix it, and come back stronger.
Mistake 5 - The quality of the policy
When advocates bring me a policy suggestion, my first question is always the most basic one: is this actually a good policy?
Unfortunately, in the policy areas I know best, a lot of what gets advocated for is simply bad policy. Much of this bad policy comes from people who aren't transport experts but work in fields transport happens to affect, which gives them a narrow, adjacent view rather than a full one. Non-transport economists tend to advocate for bigger roads. Urban planners resist development around transport hubs. Environmental advocates argue for lower fares to shift people onto public transport, even where the evidence shows that doesn't actually work. Each brings a legitimate perspective from their own field, but applies it to transport as if it were transport expertise.
If you're a non-transport expert whose field intersects with transport, the fix isn't to stay in your lane and say nothing. It's to find a genuine transport expert to develop the policy with, and to be genuinely willing to drop your preferred idea if it turns out the policy is actually bad. That second part is the hard one. It's easy to seek out expert input; it's much harder to actually listen when that input contradicts the position you started with.
Mistake 6 - A failure to consider and track implementation
In my experience, transport strategies tend to fall into one of three buckets.
The first bucket is the truly awful: strategies built entirely around the motor vehicle, focused on widening roads and adding parking to solve congestion. These fail on their own terms, since more road space simply generates more traffic to fill it.
The second bucket is the most common: the all-things-to-all-people strategy. It ducks the hard trade-offs and instead promises more of everything at once: public transport, roads, cycle lanes, equity, environmental outcomes. These strategies read well and offend no one, which is exactly the problem. Without genuine trade-offs, they never actually confront car-dominated cities, and they end up with the same congested outcome.
The third bucket is the rarest: strategies genuinely built around a multi-modal paradigm, the approach most transport experts, myself included, would actually endorse. But even places with a strategy firmly in this third bucket often end up with outcomes no better than the second bucket. The strategy is right, and the outcome still doesn't follow.
The reason is implementation. It's tempting to believe that getting the strategy and policy settings right is most of the battle, and that good outcomes will naturally follow. That's often not true. Plenty of transport agencies operate with excellent multi-modal strategies on paper while continuing to make day-to-day decisions that entrench a car-first paradigm, because nothing in how they operate actually holds them to the strategy they've published.
Most advocacy stops at the policy and strategy level and never follows through into implementation. That's a mistake. Good advocacy needs to get into the detail of how a policy will actually be implemented, how progress will be tracked, and what mechanism will hold the agency accountable if delivery drifts from what was promised.
Mistake 7 - Making the perfect the enemy of the good.
I was once involved in a reform that represented a genuine, significant step forward from where things stood at the time. It wasn't perfect. And because it wasn't perfect, one of the peak bodies involved opposed it outright. The reform died. Worse, a future minister later revived it, but implemented only the worst parts of the original policy with almost none of the upside that had made it worth pursuing in the first place. Opposing an imperfect win didn't produce a better outcome later; it produced a worse one.
I remember a conversation with a special advisor working on active transport, who was frustrated for a similar reason. His government had done more for active transport than any before it, and yet the response from cycling advocates was simply to complain that it still wasn't enough. That reaction made his job harder, not easier. It gave him less room to advocate internally for further progress, and it risked eroding the very support that had delivered the gains in the first place.
Compromise is not a failure of advocacy; it's how progress actually gets made in politics. Opposing an improvement because it falls short of the ideal might feel principled in the moment, but it routinely costs advocates the real, if partial, outcomes they were supposedly fighting for.
That said, this isn't a case for accepting anything on offer. There's a real difference between a genuine step forward and being handed scraps and told to be grateful. Doubling a tiny active transport budget still leaves it tiny.
Mistake 8 - Failing to build successful relationships with all sides.
Transport is a long game. Major infrastructure and service changes can take a decade or more to deliver. Over that timeframe, governments change, sometimes more than once. Advocacy organisations that only know how to work with one side of politics are setting themselves up for a cycle of feast and famine: real influence when their preferred party is in power, and near-total irrelevance when it isn't.
Too many transport advocacy organisations lean heavily toward one side of politics, whether by design or because of who ends up running them. That lean has a cost: parties on the other side come to see the organisation as hostile before a single conversation has happened, making it far harder to build the trust needed to shift their position. The most effective transport advocacy organisations I've encountered are trusted across the political spectrum, not because they're bland or say nothing of substance, but because they employ people who know how to speak credibly to decision-makers on all sides, not just the ones they personally agree with.
It's also not enough to simply claim political neutrality. Plenty of organisations describe themselves as non-partisan while still operating, in practice, from a narrow progressive or conservative frame that's obvious to anyone on the other side. Genuine cross-political credibility has to be built deliberately, through a broader range of people, framing, and relationships than a single ideological lens allows.
Conclusion
I doubt any advocacy organisation is guilty of all eight mistakes at once. But in my experience, most struggle with several of them at the same time, and the mistakes tend to reinforce each other. A poorly written report makes it harder to persist when the idea is rejected. Ignoring the trade-offs makes it easier to ignore the politics, because you haven't done the hard work of figuring out what you're actually asking a decision-maker to give up.
The common thread running through all of this is empathy for the decision-maker. Good advocacy is about understanding the political, financial, and practical constraints the person you're trying to influence is operating under, and then doing the work to make your idea viable within them. That means writing for them. It means finding the money, not just spending it. It means accepting the imperfect win over the perfect defeat. And it means showing up again after the first attempt fails.
Transport reform is hard enough without advocates making it harder. If this blog helps even a few organisations sharpen their approach, avoid an unforced error, or get one more good policy over the line, it will have been worth it.