Apr 11 2008
Post at Emerald City by Alex: Cyclists Are Your Friends
Last week I polled y’all to find out if you wanted me to post the articles I’m writing for the LA Times blog Emerald City here as well. Ten people voted yes, four voted no, and four voted for posting only the stuff I thought you’d like. That’s not exactly a mandate for the “yes”s, and the “no”s were pretty mean, so I’m going a third way. I’ll post an excerpt and a link from each piece.
My first post at Emerald City was fluffy piece that basically said “cyclists are humans too.” That might be pretty uninteresting but it’s actually a key piece of every activist cyclist’s reportoire: the elevator speech, transformed into blog form.
Your elevator speech is the spiel that you give when people ask you about cycling. It’s called the elevator speech because you should be able to give it during a short elevator ride with a person you don’t know.
If you hope to effectively persuade people to bike, or to be nicer to cyclists, or to hire you even though you bike, then you need a good elevator speech. Actually, you need a variety of good elevator speeches and the ability to weave them together in a way which is appropriate for the person you’re speaking to. Matt Ruscigno and I have been commiserating on ways to teach cyclists to be better activists, and this is one thing we talked about working on. So here are some good bits in this fluffy article which you can adapt for your elevator speech.
Cyclists do not want to be your enemy. We’re just fun people who happen to ride bikes to get around. We’re fun because we’re happy, and we’re happy because we enjoy our commute. As mad as it sounds, I enjoy riding Santa Monica Blvd through West Hollywood during rush hour . . .
. . . while cyclists might appear to impede traffic when you’re stuck behind one huffing and puffing uphill, they actually free up traffic. For every instance where a cyclist slows you down, there are 100 times they pass through congested traffic unnoticed. That means one less car in that traffic jam. When you get to your destination and go to park, that cyclist translates into one more available parking space.
Alright - gimme your best elevator speech below, so I can steal it!
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alex -
this isn’t an elevator speech, but rather an antiquated maxim that i like repeating every so often when i’m in the middle of telling people how great cycling is:
every little girl thinks her doll is the best. don’t tear it to shreds to prove it’s made of sawdust, give her a new one, and she’ll leave the old.
i like it because it helps me focus my energy. i don’t (or try not to) tear down people who choose to drive. it immediately puts them on the defensive:
“i have to drive”
“i live too far away”
“i’ll get sweaty”
or now we’re more likely to hear
“i drive a hybrid”
instead of forming my discussion on what they shouldn’t be doing because it’s evil, i talk about how much fun cycling is. how much i enjoy my commute. how much i enjoy the simplicty of parking. the convenience of being able to park wherever i want, to pass traffic jams, health, exercise… all of those things.
i try to be empathetic towards their concerns, while restating my positive feelings about my experiences. i also try to establish a common connection that just under two years ago, i had no experience with biking for transportation either.
everything i can do to infect them with enthusiasm, and to show them how close they are to actually changing their life. making it seem graspable, doable…
I wasn’t trying to be mean with my “no.” Just constructive. Sorry.
@Will
pffft. It was a turn of phrase. I’ll take all y’all on at once - I’m not afraid of anything!!!!!
@David
Yeah - I basically do similar things. Just try to empathize and listen.
One thing I always do when I’m talking to someone about biking - try hard to make a little progress, not a lot. If you can take a conservative business man who thinks bikes are absurd, and simply convince him that bikes are a reasonable option for yourself, you’ve made big progress. Lots of little steps eventually gets you to your destination.