Reading: I Give Up on Making Our Streets Better By: Hayden Lavigne / 07 April 2026
After years of trying very hard to be constructive, patient, polite, evidence-based, collaborative, open-minded and all the other civic-minded adjectives people love to assign to unpaid labour, I’ve reached the point where I just don’t want to do this anymore.
This is just very punchy. I wanted to save it.
I no longer think the best use of energy is trying to “persuade” elected officials who have shown us, repeatedly, they don’t care. At some point the task stops being raising awareness and starts being replacing the people in charge. I mean – you can only lovingly explain the obvious to a spineless politician so many times before you realise they aren’t confused. They’re just choosing to uphold the status quo.
Though, I do want to say, however, that maintaining the same systems is a way of maintaining status quo. So not only is it that we need to replace the people in charge, we just need to actually toss their asses, refuse to replace them, and do what would be best by working in smaller scales and with connected communal groups.
Just because we get better people in power in the same system, it does not guarantee that we're going to get better results. It's much easier to remove the problematic individuals (if we care to try, that is) in smaller scales without assigning them any degree of power over another.
Advocacy sounds noble, but in reality it’s just doing someone else’s job for free. It starts with a few emails and ends with your weekends, weeknights, group chats, and your remaining will to live being quietly devoured by bureaucrats, consultation processes and the people whose entire politics begins and ends with parking outside their house. Obviously public pressure matters – we got things done. But after a while, “community consultation” starts to sound less like democracy and more like an open casting call for every grumpy old crank to air their grievances at length.
I think this should highlight exactly part of the issue of maintaining the status quo systems, even in replacing the people in power.
Maybe I’m being a dick, but I’m also not wrong. This is what makes advocacy so exhausting: not just the opposition, but the sheer volume of bullshit, buck-passing and institutional cowardice required to avoid doing something sensible.
I don't like assigning this as cowardice because it isn't. They know who they work for, and it isn't us. This happens all the time in every place. Part of the reason where I live actually managed to get the tourist wagons in the pedestrian area of the city to go away is that they were disrupting the outside seating of the many restaurants and bars in the area; it's not that they routinely almost ran over residents who lived here or that they created a ridiculous amount of congestion (a problem that still remains unresolved but in another way); it was done because the businesses that are located here didn't like them, and the tourism companies that run them... didn't lose anything in them being banned.
Because they still had their outer-city tourist wagons to drive to the other major tourist locations in the city. And now they could easily push for doing tour groups of 30-50 people (which take up the whole fucking street because tourists don't care if they inconvenience people, and it still creates the same amount of—if not more—congestion).
None of this is because of cowardice. It's because they benefit. Many public officials where I live also have conflicts of interest with tourism, which is why the tourism industry gets so many benefits. It's why they get away with things the rest of us can't. That's not cowardice; it's complicity and intent.
But my view now, is that, we are spending far too much time treating elected people as blank slates who simply need a little more evidence, a little more explanation, a little more community input, when in reality many of them have already shown you what they are.
Which is still not cowards, but I agree.
They have shown you that climate targets, active transport strategies and “healthy streets” branding all evaporate the second somebody starts yelling about parking or trader access or the end of civilisation as we know it. They have shown you that what they love most is saying the right thing in theory and doing absolutely nothing difficult in practice.
They don't love doing it, I think. They'd probably be happier if we shut up and left them alone entirely. Some do get a sadistic amount of glee from telling us no or pretending to care. But they've shown that they love the benefits they get from exploiting our communities.
I would much rather spend my energy helping the right people get elected than continuing to beg the wrong ones to care.
I'm kind of sad that this is the perpetual take-away, especially considering how often we do get the “right” people elected, and they perpetually end up... being almost as ineffective.
Again, putting good people into a system that isn't designed for them is either going to make them frustrated and ineffective (with other people creating obstacles for them) or prompt them to start negotiating their values (often for the worse).