What do you think?
Rate this book
If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy
Your transit and street safety dreams are within your reach. While challenging our dangerous car-centric systems can feel daunting, you can win, and this book is here to help. In If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight, transportation activist and advocacy consultant Carter Lavin provides a roadmap for transforming passion into political power.
Whether your dream is to make your community safer and more sustainable by getting protected bike lanes, improving bus service, or expanding high-speed rail, this book provides step-by-step guidance on organizing for change. Through advice from dozens of advocates across the United States and Lavin’s own experience with over 100 campaigns, readers will learn transportation-specific strategies to win. Critically, the book teaches readers how to deftly navigate their political, cultural, and historical contexts to adapt their advocacy efforts and make allies -- from local businesses to transit agency staff to key decision makers. Action points at the end of each chapter and a toolbox of campaign tactics at the end of the book enable readers to move seamlessly from brainstorming into concrete action.
Whether you are just starting out or have engaged in transportation advocacy for a while, the tools and insights in this book will help you develop, plan, and execute the transportation-related campaign of your choosing. Professionals in the transportation space will also discover how to be an effective advocate while working within the system.
Accessible and inspirational, If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight will be a game-changer for people who want our communities to prioritize people over cars.
Your transportation dreams are all possible. Are you ready to fight for them?
Whether your dream is to make your community safer and more sustainable by getting protected bike lanes, improving bus service, or expanding high-speed rail, this book provides step-by-step guidance on organizing for change. Through advice from dozens of advocates across the United States and Lavin’s own experience with over 100 campaigns, readers will learn transportation-specific strategies to win. Critically, the book teaches readers how to deftly navigate their political, cultural, and historical contexts to adapt their advocacy efforts and make allies -- from local businesses to transit agency staff to key decision makers. Action points at the end of each chapter and a toolbox of campaign tactics at the end of the book enable readers to move seamlessly from brainstorming into concrete action.
Whether you are just starting out or have engaged in transportation advocacy for a while, the tools and insights in this book will help you develop, plan, and execute the transportation-related campaign of your choosing. Professionals in the transportation space will also discover how to be an effective advocate while working within the system.
Accessible and inspirational, If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight will be a game-changer for people who want our communities to prioritize people over cars.
Your transportation dreams are all possible. Are you ready to fight for them?
216 pages, Paperback
Published November 13, 2025
9 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 27, 2025
This book is a shortcut for new transportation advocates. It has so much information on how to fight, things I wish I would have known about years ago. Highly recommend to people who want to do the work and do it smarter.
November 17, 2025
This is the book I have been looking for since 2022- when I started my transportation advocacy journey. In 2022 I was visiting Bern Switzerland when I read in my Rick Steves guidebook that the city had a goal of a car-free downtown and that sentence blew my mind and I wondered how to get my city to have a similar goal. We have a a Pedestrian Mall and I believe we can build our first protected bike lane in the near future. This book was also a great reflection of some things I have already tried and gave me great ideas of how to grow my efforts. Bike build communities!
November 14, 2025
Have you ever read a book that says, "We need you to make change in your community!" and thought, "Okay . . . how???"
This book is for you. And for me, because that is a thought I have had probably hundreds of times.
Each chapter is based around a practical step activists can take on their way to victory, like coalition-building or planning actions. And the advice inside each chapter is gloriously concrete.
This isn't abstract theory about political change. It's a manual for getting out there and doing it. I've been waiting for this book for years!
This book is for you. And for me, because that is a thought I have had probably hundreds of times.
Each chapter is based around a practical step activists can take on their way to victory, like coalition-building or planning actions. And the advice inside each chapter is gloriously concrete.
This isn't abstract theory about political change. It's a manual for getting out there and doing it. I've been waiting for this book for years!
November 17, 2025
Carter Lavin's "If You Want To Win, You've Got To Fight" is an extra special, cover-to-cover manual for organizing around the expansion of public goods and services. His speciality happens to be public transit, which is where I spend most of my life.
I've been doing this work for over a decade and there are so many new things I learned from reading Carter's book, especially his insights on coalition building--which is not optional in this dogged race for space.
A magnificent read from Island Press as usual and available through their site for 25% off with code "EXASPERATED"
I've been doing this work for over a decade and there are so many new things I learned from reading Carter's book, especially his insights on coalition building--which is not optional in this dogged race for space.
A magnificent read from Island Press as usual and available through their site for 25% off with code "EXASPERATED"
December 13, 2025
This is the book I wish someone handed me three years ago when I started my journey into bike advocacy.
I will take the lessons in this book and build more efficiently off the groundwork I’ve already done
The book came into my life at a pivotal moment where burnout was looming in my horizon, so the chapter on that was greatly appreciated
If you are even remotely motivated to get into transportation advocacy, put this book on your reading list
I will take the lessons in this book and build more efficiently off the groundwork I’ve already done
The book came into my life at a pivotal moment where burnout was looming in my horizon, so the chapter on that was greatly appreciated
If you are even remotely motivated to get into transportation advocacy, put this book on your reading list
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews