The Roadmap
What Comes Next
The Argument ends with an ask to each of the three movements. Here's what could happen if we move forward together.
Where Abundance Wins
A thought leader within the movement could champion the case made in “Infrastructure Delivery Is Not Outcomes Delivery” — a conference session built around it, a podcast conversation, a single influential voice deciding this is worth carrying. Abundance organizations already doing great work on infrastructure delivery could double their impact (and their case to funders) by adding programming on outcomes delivery.
The long view: elected leaders asking for the mechanism to actually deliver results — reaching for civic tech's tools to build it, and for advocacy's representation to make sure it is built around the needs of the users. Eventually these results start to rebuild public trust that government will deliver transportation that actually gets them where they need to go and is safe, sustainable, and affordable.
Where Civic Tech Wins
A thought leader within this world — Pahlka, someone else at the Recoding America Fund, US Digital Response, or Niskanen's state-capacity team — could open the door for an honest H2-/H2+ assessment of transportation's existing wins, identify the specific barriers standing in the way of results, and start developing the mechanism to remove them.
This is the next step in CivTech's field-building effort to update government's operating system, just extended to a new domain. In time, transportation becomes one more place where CivTech tools are recognized as turning point from business-as-usual to a newer, more effective government.
Where Advocacy Wins
Of the three conversations, government's ability to deliver results should matter most to advocacy. T4America has already made the diagnosis as clearly as it can be made: the status quo isn't working, by its own numbers, on every measure that matters. Somewhere in this movement, there has to be an appetite for finding a way past the barriers that keep producing that result — and abundance's reach and civic tech's mechanism are sitting right there, unclaimed, for exactly that purpose.
The long view: a results-over-rhetoric philosophy, reinforced nationwide because abundance helped carry it there. Civic tech's tools, teamed up directly with advocacy organizations, focused on the actual mechanisms that drive results. In short: the system advocacy has always wanted. One where people can get to their jobs, schools, and the places they need to be — reliably, in whatever mode they prefer, safely, affordably, and sustainably.
Closing
Three conversations with everything to gain by joining forces, and nothing to lose. Let's make it happen.