If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy

by Carter Lavin

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?
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Transport, Urban Planning, Urban, Urbanism, Public Transport

216 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2025

Reviews

[Kelsey Huse · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Angie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Paula]

Truly a guide to community organizing. Very helpful introduction of what political activism entails from building a team to choosing escalation tactics for a specific campaign. It tells a lot in rough strokes which feels very intimidating if you're reading chapter after chapter. Nonetheless and ultimately, it succinctly gave me the guidance I've been looking for.

[Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great overview of effective organizing strategy. I especially appreciated the emphasis that even if you don’t win a particular campaign, it was still valuable to take action and you are still in a stronger place than you were before. You still built relationships, created a coalition, got people’s contact information, educated reporters and politicians about your issue, and raised awareness about an issue in your community—which gives great bones for future campaigns and makes them more winnable. I also loved seeing people that I’ve met in the transit organizing space be quoted in this book. So fun to see all of the interconnected-ness!

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed book to guide advocates from start to end, and I appreciate the reminder to take breaks or even reassess if one should continue advocating. Even for non-advocates, professionals in the transportation planning and engineering field can learn much about how to communicate and things to consider when engaging with the public and politicians.

I would have liked to see more content covering the how advocacy needs to evolve in the age of social media and AI. How do we build a successful media campaign to spread the word and engage people? what have been positive use cases of AI and what have not?

[Roooot · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Samuel Sklar · Rating 5 out of 5]

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"

[Ian Mccausland · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Florance Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an important and useful book of love and wisdom! Having had the pleasure of knowing Carter and his advocacy work in the Bay Area, he demonstrates these valuable lessons well on paper and in practice. This book includes anecdotes and stories from many transportation and climate activists as well as concrete steps and action points to apply to your life. Well done Carter!

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doggone helpful guide on transit advocacy

This has been a doggone good guide to transit advocacy. Full of all the basics you need by a seasoned pro. You'll learn everything from power mapping to self care. This book is also intended to be read out of order when need be so please pick up a copy if you care about public transit!

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll start off by saying I'm biased here because I love public transportation and because I know Carter personally and it's been incredible to see him dedicate his life towards transportation advocacy as well as to write a book! (We went to college together, where we worked on environmental advocacy.)

This is a really succinct and straightforward guide to how to get involved in advocacy. It has a lot of easy and digestible guides for what to do, how to do it, and how to think about it. It spells out everything well in a super logical and strategic way. A true how-to.

In a probably unintended way, I also think it could serve as a great guide for how to also organize within a large corporation and could even be a good book to read for people interested in business.

[Swantje · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of detailed advice. When you get overwhelmed, refer back to this book and you will find the one next step you can take. Remember, you’re not alone, fight together with others. Most of the strategies can not only be applied to transportation, but to other fields, such as housing.