Polls show we spend more time gambling or guzzling social media sewage than reading, and that’s a shame. There’s less chance people who need it will absorb the wisdom of Dale Carnegie’s 1936 bestseller “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
People like Greater Boston’s ultra-fervent bike supremacists, currently putting on a clinic of how to pedal a worthy cause into a political ditch.
Local bicycling enthusiasts have had powerful allies, from avid biker Tom Menino through pro-bike Marty Walsh and now Michelle Wu, a staunch advocate for getting people out of cars and onto bikes and public transit. Rightly so. While Boston has the nation’s second-safest roads according to the US Safe Streets index and ranks 94th in pedestrian deaths, anything that eases congestion, pollution and reliance on costly car travel is worth doing.
Or, at least, trying to do. After taking office in 2022, Wu moved aggressively to expand bike and bus lanes and traffic-calming measures. She installed a chief of streets, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, who turned out to be a human GLP-1 pen, forcibly injecting so-called “road diets” into neighborhoods with an attitude of disregard for community feedback described by one activist as “we own the streets, so we’re gonna do what we want.”
The backlash, in many cases from longtime Wu allies, was intense. After a city study validated the critics’ complaints about a lack of due process, Wu returned Franklin-Hodge to the Bluebike rack and imposed a pause in the bike-and-bus-lane program. In a June 24 onstage interview with MASSterList, the mayor said the program would soon resume but added: “We can't have a one-size-fits-all approach just to be able to move as fast as possible.”
But that’s exactly what the bike supremacists are demanding in the wake of the tragic death of Louisa Gag, a former Wu intern turned City Hall transportation planner who was struck and killed by a truck at a problematic Tremont Street intersection. In an open letter to the mayor, the activists essentially blame Wu for the young woman’s death, claiming she has “stalled and restudied safety projects” like one planned for the Tremont Street accident site. (The Globe reports it’s “not immediately clear” if those changes would have “prevented the crash.”) “Build fast and fix later,” they demand. “Consensus never arrives for the dead, and a study protects no one.”
Self-satisfying virtue signaling, perhaps, but useless political advice. They want Wu to restart every paused street-safety project and end “the practice of holding projects hostage” to community criticism, somehow finding the money to restore pending cuts in transportation funding (at the expense of other line-items) because “budgets are moral documents.”
No, they’re not. They’re budgets, the often unsatisfying fusion of wish lists with reality. And in a final, dyspeptic spasm, the letter threatens their ally in graphic terms. “None of us is willing to raise our families in a city whose leadership will not answer for preventable deaths on its own streets. We are asking you to do what is right. And if you cannot or will not, you will have forfeited the trust a mayor needs to govern — and no study or prolonged consensus project will win it back.”
A pretty good description of what would happen to Wu should she be seen caving to a special-interest’s ultimatum.
Which brings us back to Dale Carnegie, and his nine tips for how to change human behavior: “Begin with praise and honest appreciation; call attention to people's mistakes indirectly; talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person; ask questions instead of giving direct orders; let the other person save face; praise every improvement; give the other person a fine reputation to live up to; use encouragement, make the fault seem easy to correct; make the other person happy about doing what you suggest.”
These folks are batting oh-for-nine. It’s a whole new definition of hitting for the cycle.
