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Darrien Glasser

@notjustbikes urbanist twitter kills me. You get a bunch of yappers and not a soul who does anything. You can ask them to send a single email and nothing gets done. They’ll post the grassy tram tracks tomorrow though and bemoan the lack of urbanism in America (if only someone would do something).

I used to have a page for our ST local conversation there, but I just got frustrated with them after a while and killed it. We just have an FB page and email list for locals now

@Darriengineer @notjustbikes This was literally my girlfriend for some time. And then I said "have you told this thing, that you've told me 6 times now, to someone who can *actually do something about it?*"

She now writes e-mails to representatives *and* tell me 6 more times. Small leaps.

@Darriengineer @notjustbikes I think this is a problem with social media activism in general. It’s easy to post, not a lot of thought is required to send off a tweet.

@Darriengineer @notjustbikes I think a lot of it comes from a great deal of evidence that those with the power to change things give exactly zero fucks what we think.

From urbanism, to genocide, to climate change, after 300 form letter responses from politicians demonstrably beholden to interests other than your own, the suggestion that one should "write their representative" sounds more like naïve hopes & prayers than a call to action.

@danielquinn @Darriengineer @notjustbikes

I dunno: writing to City Council in Victoria BC seems to be helpful.

Also helpful is to write letters to the Editor of the local paper to counter the NIMBYism that is so prevalent in this section of the paper.

Using the actual infrastructure also helps. Someone asked on Reddit about folks using a bike lane on a steep hill: in no time there were a bunch of responses claiming to do so.

And it helps a lot when we get help from higher levels of Gvmt.