vanshnookenraggen on the past, present, and future of transportation
vanshnookenraggen on the past, present, and future of transportation
His real name is Andrew Lynch and he makes maps. He's also working hard to reconnect Queens.
This one is super exciting. Through this newsletter, I’ve gotten the chance to meet Andrew Lynch, who many of you might know by his online pseudonym, vanshnookenragen. Below is one of two conversations I’ve had with Andrew over the past two years; this one is geared toward my traditional line of questioning—how my interviewee got to where they are today and a deep dive into the state of the field.
Our interview has been edited for length and clarity, and timelines have been corrected to match current events.
I got started purely out of trying to understand history. And there were a couple of moments where the “light” went off. When I was a teenager, I moved to a town outside of Boston—it was right at the edge of the T. And I was excited to take the T because I felt like living in a city that had a metro meant I was living in a real city.
My friend's parents would tell me that in the ‘80s, they [the MBTA] were supposed to extend the T through the town. And I was like, “What does a map of that look like?” This was before you could find everything on the Internet, so I just couldn't find anything. I didn't understand anything about urban planning; I'm a kid, I don't know these things. So when I got to college in downtown Boston I remembered and I began finding these websites that talked about the history of the T in Boston.
I just went down this rabbit hole of trying to understand and as I walked around the city, I started to see the history in front of me. Boston’s an incredibly historic city and they wear it on their sleeve. To walk around, you can see layers of history. In that journey of trying to understand where I was, I found all of these stories and ideas of what the city could have been. Boston, for a small city, has always, and still has, huge ambitions. And so there's all these phenomenal, massive urban renewal projects that they wanted to do—some of which they did—that would and did completely transform the city.
I started to figure out the histories of these unbuilt T lines. As I was doing that, I started thinking about ones I could come up with, “What if we did this and this and this? This is purely a nerdy hobby (I would do it at two in the morning). I wasn't happy enough just to think about it; I needed to see a map. I'd never made a map before, but I had some Photoshop experience, so I sat down and taught myself how to draw lines and how to make a map. It was very rudimentary, but it got started.
I thought, “I'm going to post this on the internet and if somebody likes it, cool.” That's the gist. The majority of what I've done in my life with my art is “I made this. I thought it was cool. What do you guys think?”
I was studying Industrial Design, and I loved the theory, but when it came to product design, and getting ready to go into a workplace and do that, I just didn't care. And that's when I discovered what urban planning was. (I think a lot of people of my generation played way too much SimCity.) We all grew up thinking, “Oh, it's just so simple. We can do all these things,” even though the real world is nothing like that. I took some time off, and I read more about it.
When I decided to go back to college, I thought to myself, “I hate school. I hate structured learning. I hate authority.” It's why I do the things I do. I needed to figure out something to study that there's no way I could fail: I can graduate and then I can go off and get a Master’s; I can do whatever. I like maps so geography would be a good pursuit, and the school that had the best geography department and was very affordable was CUNY Hunter on the Upper East Side.
Moving to New York was probably the last thing on Earth I wanted to do, but I could do it for four or five years and move on from there. In August I will have been In New York for 18 years, so the city grew on me. Geography’s not something most people study and it's a good base. That's exactly why I chose it: I had every intention of going to get my Master's in Urban Planning, but by the time I was done at Hunter, I couldn't be in school anymore.
And my senior year, I had an internship at the Port Authority in their planning department. That was phenomenal—you see how the sausage is made.
I remember this vividly: I was sitting in this cubicle, and in the cubicle next to me was this guy who was about my dad's age and had worked there for 30 years or something. Every day, he was on the phone talking about this project—the Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel, which has been talked about since the 1800s. Listening to him talk about this just killed any ideology or any hope I could have had about this type of work environment being the place for me.
I realized I'm not going to do this for a job, but I’ve got to figure something out. I went into real estate; I was an agent for a long time. I enjoyed it until I just got burnt out because it's a very hard job. It allowed me to meet different people in that industry and understand what real estate means to the City of New York.
I still always had my maps and my blog to talk about the nerdy stuff that I was really into. It was at that point that I developed some of the posters that I'd never thought about selling before. I'd made so many maps of the Subway that I had all these Shapefiles. [Ed. Shapefiles are the series of files that allow planners and mapmakers to make geographic maps.]
The MTA shut me down overnight, so I had to get a contract with them. But that made me realize, “Maybe this could be more; maybe not professional, but it’s not just a hobby.” If I had to set up an LLC, I may as well be more serious about it.
I left real estate and I've been bartending ever since. And the irony is, I had always thought of that typical bartender-artist as being a failure. I've never been happier and I've never had more money. It's also an amazing way to get exposure because you don't know who's sitting across that bar from you. You meet the best and the craziest people, but I've also met people who have literally changed my life, so I look at it as “meant to be.”
But it also allowed me to cut out everything else in my life and say, “What's important here? What do I really want to do?” That's when I got more serious about looking at transportation as more than a fun history project and making maps just for fun, “Maybe I could make a living off of this.” I could do something more serious like being an advocate and understanding things for people; distill that information and take something complicated and make it easier to understand. Especially with a map.
It was around that time that I was invited to join Queensrail, which had been this advocacy group out in Queens fighting to restore service on an abandoned rail line, the Rockaway Beach branch. It was an old Long Island Railroad line. It’s something I had read about, but I had no personal interaction with and I'd never actually been out there. Even though I've explored a lot of abandoned railroads, I hadn't been to this one. I had written this post arguing that these two groups one was pro-rail and one was pro-park—the Queensway. They wanted to build a High Line-style park on it.
I said, “Everywhere else in the world, they’d figured out how to utilize an asset like this for all of its potential.” For both rail and for open space. Something seemed fishy—there were these two sides that were fighting and not working together. So I wrote a post and the President of QueensLink, Rick Horan, emailed me and said, “I'd love to talk to you about this proposal…” I didn't even have a proposal, but we talked and he was like, “Would you like to be a part of this?” And I immediately said, “Yes.”
And so I helped rebrand and develop this new product, looking at how we could reimagine the Rockaway Beach Branch as this unifying park and transportation asset.
When the MTA released its feasibility report they said it was going to cost $8 billion. We had looked at that and said, “That doesn't make sense.” We raised some money and hired this consultant to dissect the plan.
I meet a lot of technical professionals who have all these great ideas, but they can't get any of them done. It’s the politicians who get ideas off the paper this whole other aspect of it. Transportation professionals get burnt out because they're fighting that system and not working within it.
There are also ones that just coast on that system—and, whatever, we’ve all got to do what we got to do. Well, you're not going to change the world that way. You've got to fight the good fight. And so even though everyone wants to be an insider, what I brought to the table is as an outsider. I can speak up about things that if I was on the inside, would get buried, muted, or ignored. I'm not that naive to think that, “We're going to put this proposal out and everyone's going to get on board.”
I have no doubt this is going to be a very long fight [Ed. It continues.]. That seems more fun to me.
What’s the timeline between you starting your geography degree and being in a place where people recognize you and your brand?
I've been recognized on the street and it's really weird because I don't put myself out there all that much, especially visually. People don't know my face. I put out the original posters around 2013. It was the New York City Track that changed everything. My website crashed from the traffic and I woke up the next day and I had people hitting me up for interviews about it. In 2018, I joined QueensLink. Every couple of years, I build and build and build. Right now I have a ton of stuff going on and every time I release a map, it just gets more exposure. The Chicago one was interesting. I released that in December 2020. I had been working on that for almost two years.
I didn't think it would go anywhere because not only do I not know that many people in Chicago, but also I don't write about Chicago, so they don't know me. And I put it out and it was massively popular.
In New York, maybe even in Boston, you have a much younger generation that is interested in transportation, transit, the history of the railroads, and all that stuff. In Chicago, I didn't see that. And what I found was all those people were like in their 70s and 80s. They didn't know how to open up a PDF, so they weren't going to look at my map. And that was interesting trying to navigate that generational divide. What helped in New York, because it's younger, it's easier for me to just have a blog, be on X, and talk about things—and I can get that exposure.
Yes. Where did the name “vanshnookenraggen” come from?
It’s complete gibberish I made up when I was in 10th grade. So I just said all right, let me try that. Believe me, this was before I was doing anything, and hearing people try to pronounce it made me laugh and I just thought to myself, “I'm going to make people take this word seriously.” So it's a joke that I play on everyone for them to take this seriously.
I thought it was like a family name from the Netherlands or something
I think most people do. It's like Häagen-Dazs—it means nothing.
What do you think we've gotten wrong as planners and engineers—the planning-industrial complex?
We haven't been taught how government works or how it's supposed to work. There is no underlying technocratic base that is telling our elected officials what they should be doing. Maybe [Mayor] Bloomberg created or cultivated one. Most other leaders aren’t going to come in and be like, “Okay, what do you have for me?” They're going to come in and say, “This is what I want to do; how do I do it?”
Transportation professionals are taught much more technically—how do you build this bridge so it doesn't fall down?—because realistically, if you have a job, you want to do that job as well as possible. Not everyone is going to be at the top managing everything, and we need someone to design a road that's going to be safe, right?
Sometimes that can be fine. Projects call for engineers or architects who have an obligation to build this one piece. But when it comes to planning, there are so many other forces at play—socioeconomic, political—and some friends and I will have this whole conversation about “What can we do here?” and we play SimCity in our head. At the same time, there are real people involved.
Planners get in their own way too much when they say, “Oh, we can't do this because people aren't going to like it.” If a project is worthwhile, and you can prove it, then you can make a case for it. Because I come from real estate and sales, I always take this point of view that it's up to the planner to sell their project. A lot of these planners don't always think about who's going to be selecting these things. It's either a committee, a governor, or a mayor who have got all these other aspects to think about. They don't always care what's technically feasible, but they do care what's politically feasible, whereas a planner needs to understand both.
What we get wrong is not having all those aspects of a project together.
Yes, a project has to work from an engineering standpoint and it has to be financially viable, but you also have to think, “How's this going to progress?” Because there are so many great projects that just die because they don't have enough funding, support, or demand, or it could be all these things.
What we get wrong is just not being serious about political realities.
There’s this cycle of disinvestment and it’s not just infrastructure disinvestment, but it's a disinvestment in people. Traffic engineers can build a good highway then go to schools and teach the next generation. We don't have that in transit. The people that fought the good fight—let's say they work their way up from track work to management. What's the incentive for them to teach the next generation? [Ed. Is it all parochial?] The next generation is going to come in, and the previous workforce is going to leave and take all of its institutional knowledge with it. This is the reality at the MTA. They lost a lot of people during COVID and they're not bringing new people in.
At the very least, we have to end that broken cycle. Part of fixing this is allowing people to be curious. When I talk to transportation professionals who have been in the industry for a long time they are so cynical, and I don't blame them. I don't blame them at all.
I get the sense that when you start in management at the MTA you're more idealistic; you want to make all these changes because you're passionate about the MTA. And you're up against this wall of old timers that got burnt out of that a long time ago, and they’ve got their pensions and kids to put through college. And they have no illusions about the reality of getting things done. So the kids that do care leave or they become callous and old just like the people they’ve fought against.
That was a long way of saying we need better leadership. The people that we elect don't have to understand transit and they don't even have to understand highways.
I've dealt with a lot of politicians with the QueensLink project and the most that they comprehend transit is what they hear from their constituents, which makes sense. Their job isn't to say, “How can I fix transit?” It's: “How can I serve my constituency?” The constituency doesn’t need to understand capacity or signal systems, either. They just want to get to where they're going promptly and feel safe doing so.
Transit planners need to get their heads out of transportation—especially engineers—they’re focused on the details way too much. See the bigger picture. Constituents or riders might be complaining about some aspect of the transit system, and it would behoove the politician to approach some transportation professionals and ask, “Okay, how does this work? What's happening here?”
The vast majority don't and it sucks to say, “As long as the trains are running, even if they're terrible, that's all that matters. My constituents can get to their job.” Maybe they're cynical: “There's no money for this.”
What else?
Yonah Freemark wrote a piece on how land use policy is completely disconnected from transportation policy. This is probably the biggest problem. Because we are in America, our capitalist system tells us transportation is an industry, therefore it's business, and therefore, it should make money, and if it doesn't make money, it's a failure. When in reality, public transportation is a different beast. It's okay that it doesn't make money. It's not there to make money. It's there to make the city grow in a certain structured way.
Politicians always understand that if you build a railroad you can develop that land along and around it. But there are other ways to capture that value and that ambition has been lost, especially in New York.
I've been reading a couple of books on the development of the Subway and what amazes me is that the city didn't recapture land value along the lines.
After World War I, there was this pent-up demand, all these immigrants lived on the Lower East Side and inflation was really bad. The City wanted to promote growth and they did offer a tax abatement for new homes. That's why you see a lot of South Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx just explode with development in the ‘20s. It all went along the southern lines because cars weren't as dominant in the ‘20s.
The next time they had a chance to do that was after World War II. If Robert Moses hadn’t dominated construction and infrastructure after WWII, New York would today have more of a balance between the Subway and cars—probably like Chicago, where you have the Metro running down the expressway medians. But he didn't want to do that. He put all the money into cars and the city could not recapture any value compared to the investments made in mass transit.
New York has been terrible about maintaining its systems. The whole point. So the fun story of the Subway is that the city didn't like these private operators, the IRT and the BMT, running the subways, but they had this lease agreement. And so they wrote into the lease that the subway operators could only charge a nickel. But the city wouldn't let them raise fares because they wanted to starve them out. In 1940, the City took over, but they kept the nickel fare, which means the City inherited these systems that were falling apart, and then didn't reinvest anything into them. And it wasn't until after World War II, that the city finally had to reckon with this. They issued some bonds—they sold them all to build a Second Avenue Subway and then didn't spend a dime on a Second Avenue subway. It was all smoke and mirrors. There was no mechanism for reinvesting other than issuing phantom bonds.
What they could have done is say, “Alright, we were going to pay for this with a property tax or sales tax and all this cash is going to go into an operating fund or a capital construction fund.” Instead, what these politicians said was, “Well, why should we take the city's property tax and spend that over here, when we can spend it on all of our other projects, and buy votes toward reelection for pet projects.”
Then the city runs to the state or Federal government and asks for a bailout—every two years this happens. There’s this broken symbiosis, where the City can only exist because the Subway exists, but they don't want to pay for it. At its core, this is why our service is so bad.
I don't necessarily think that the city having control over the Subway is the right course of action.
[Ed. New York City still owns the Subway but leases it to New York State. For all intents and purposes, the State owns and operates the Subway through the MTA, a State agency.]
The debt load is outrageous. I don't even think the city could legally take on that type of debt [Ed. It’s about $46 billion.] Even if it did, I'm not like how the Mayor is any better than the Governor.
What I would like to see in this regard is connecting land use to the Subway again. From a purely financial perspective, the MTA has no incentive to expand—the only thing the MTA is going to get out of system expansion is more debt because it can't control enough development, except in small pockets. Maybe Hudson Yards made sense. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much. The city then can sit back and say, “Alright, we get more property tax.” I think the perfect example of this is Fourth Avenue rezoning in Brooklyn to make a high-rise district. The Subway’s right there. On paper that works, but the R train has terrible service and there's not a lot of potential for increasing it because of a lot of different bottlenecks in the systems and different demand in different areas. Most politicians don't understand this, and even if you try to explain that to them, their eyes would glaze over.
I briefly looked at some numbers recently—the city gets around $30 billion from property tax each year. Well, the next MTA capital campaign is like $50 billion and congestion pricing isn't going to pay for half of that. Then, on top of it, we don't have enough people to do that work. ,
People like to rip on the MTA for overtime costs, but there aren't enough human beings that are capable of doing the work and that's why they have to get paid so much. Pensions stop the MTA from hiring people because it's more expensive to hire new people and then train them than it is just to have these old-timers. The scary thing about that is when we rely on these overworked and exhausted people, the chance for something to go wrong, or not be fixed properly, rises exponentially. =
Switching gears a bit, the now-dead AirTrain extension to LaGuardia, no-build was never really an option. There was this inevitability in the language and the approach from every single one of our agencies toward building this massive infrastructure project, because it has to happen. It was such an insular thought. It was this high-modernist idea, a monument to lumbering mobility, which has manifested in a Faustian bargain.
They were so concerned about how to do it that they never thought if they should do it...what problem is it solving and then is this the best way to solve that problem?
I tell the kids who are always sending me their fantasy maps and ideas, “Don't try to use some Subway extension to solve all the problems.” Go figure out what the problem is, develop a bunch of different solutions, and apply the one that works best.
I can't fault anyone for imagining lines on a map, because so much of my past was just drawing lines on a map with crayons. But I want these kids to learn from my mistakes. If we have this new generation of planners, they have to learn how to think about these things.
It's funny that you mentioned the AirTrain, because I was emailing one of the guys working on the Queensrail counter report, and we were talking about the JFK to Lower Manhattan Air Link. It was going to be an extension to the AirTrain that they wanted to do after 9/11. The 2003 report said the exact same thing. Governor Pataki at the time said, “I want you to extend the AirTrain from JFK to Lower Manhattan; figure out how to do it.” They went through all these options.
This is something that we can look back at and understand through hindsight. But at the time, the point was, how do we serve Lower Manhattan—it wasn't, “How do we serve the airport best?” It was, “How do we stick all this stuff in Lower Manhattan? How do we put all this money in here so it makes it look like we care?”
I remember being at the Port Authority in ‘09 and I couldn't tell you if anybody bought that project up. I even talked to someone who worked on the original AirTrain and they didn't even bring it up. It was never a serious idea. And I think the thing that's scary about the AirTrain to LaGuardia is that it had the potential to be a more serious idea than not.
It wouldn't be the end of the world. It's just not good planning.
They're not teaching this type of thinking in transportation planning schools—at least they weren’t 10 years ago. I know because I went through it and I came out a complete neophyte.
I'm a pretty left-leaning person. I align with a lot of progressive ideas and values But also align with the idea that how we spend money is a reflection of our values. In that respect, should the subway be free?
Oh, of course not. It's a terrible idea. I’ve spent a lot of the last few years thinking about my politics because as I've gotten older, I’ve gotten more perspective on things. I considered myself pretty leftist when I was a kid. And now I see this new generation—and this is always how it works—who has different values.
Let me just say, everyone on the Right is batshit insane so I don't have to worry about them. My problem with the Left has never been with their diagnosing of problems—I'm on board with what they usually say is a problem. It's that their proposed solutions lack basic rigor. They want to do the right thing, not because the thing they want to do is the correct thing, but because they have an ideological angle or they want people to see them doing the thing that they want to be doing.
That's where I get turned off by leftists, especially when it comes down to stuff like urban policy. You might hate capitalism, and there are probably a lot of reasons to hate capitalism but you're not going to “fix” capitalism with these little pockets of socialism. Making the subways free is fine, but how do you pay for it?
Surveys that have come out usually reflect that respondents don’t necessarily crave free subways, but rather subways that work, that run on time, that run frequently, that run reliably, and that are safe. There’s a big disconnect between those principles and “free.”
It sounds great. Of course, we want people who live far from job centers to have access to affordable, in some cases free, or non-impactful pricing. Subways don't lose money—they cost money to the public. It's a campaign that a politician who cares about the workings of New York City has to run. I haven’t seen a candidate who understands this run a serious campaign for Mayor or Governor in New York.
I don't think I've ever seen a candidate who does.
People say, “Oh, because they're upstate, they don't understand the Subway.” Okay. But look at Boston; there are a lot of politicians that take the T to work. And they seem to understand it, but Mike Dukakis was the last one that gave a shit, and he's a hippie at this point.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee comes to mind as someone who pretends to understand how transit works. He's a climate guy. He understands the connection. And he's lucky to have Roger Millar running the DOT, who is a transit/safe streets/smart growth type of planner. There are pockets of governors and state DOT directors who, too, understand transit…there's a reason why a lot of them are still highway departments and don’t build or operate transit at the state level.
What is the top priority for you that we can change right now?
The popular thing is making it harder to drive. That's true and we do need to do that. What I don't like about it is so many of these people are proposing making it harder to drive from an ideological standpoint and not from a technical standpoint,
I don't like that these are people coming out saying, “Okay, I choose to live this life, I have the privilege of living this life where I don't have to drive, which personally is why I live in New York City, I've driven a dozen times in my life, and I'd probably kill myself if I got behind the wheel of a car. I live in New York because I can bike and I take the train or the bus. That is my privilege.”
And to say to other people, “You have to live this way,” is very elitist. Even if there are all these good reasons for you to say biking is somewhat healthier, better for the environment, the list goes on, but if you're going to state it from an ideological standpoint, and you're also not going to engage with all these other people who think and live differently than you do and ask them, “How can we work together?” you’re on the losing end of a long battle.
Central Brooklynites love being on their bikes, but how many of them have cars to get out of town?
As a nation, we need to work together and not accuse people of living a certain way by saying, “You don't need to drive.” There are a lot of people in Queens, who would love to take transit. It turns out that doesn't work when you have to wait 25 minutes for an A train or get on a bus that isn't going to take you where you want to go. You drive.
You get these bike advocates or anti-car advocates that’ll make fun of all these people out in Queens who are protesting Open Streets. How about you listen to what they're saying, instead of just making fun of them on X?
This group’s point was, “Look, we're not against this, but we want it to work for us.” And then you had all these people who have never been out there. They're just like, “Oh, these people are bad.”
That’s not the point.
I'm also not one of these anti-car guys. I'm a pro-mode-choice planner. I want people to have the opportunity to decide which mode works for them. We have to plan with people, and not with people—who are likely experts about their own community and what they need. We are obligated to not just use engagement to rush through environmental review.
People know when they’re being used to push some idea that’s been cooked up in an office. Sarah Kaufman at NYU said something really interesting to me: we have to design our streets, not by mode, but by speed. And I think she's exactly right.
I’ll get crucified for this, but maybe a bike lane isn't the right answer for a particular street if it’s safe enough to ride because we’ve designed it for slow, safe travel. Maybe it’s not worth going through a whole process that’s not guaranteed to work, where the only outcome is losing your constituency’s trust.
There’s this deep idea of “what problem are you solving?” with an open street. I like the Open Streets program. I think many of them should be reimagined as permanent pedestrian and bike plazas.
Maybe foisting an open street or bikeshare onto these communities can’t solve its problems because you haven't identified and fleshed out what the problem is. Sometimes, the best way to alleviate poverty is not bikeshare, but access to a car. It’s sacrilege but maybe true. I think a lot of planners are spooked to go out there and have a conversation and defend their ideas. But that’s a product of the contentious environment and centuries of mistrust brewing.
Can you talk about one or two things that would make a successful 2030—QueensLink can be one of them.
The Subway needs to change how it serves people. At first, they were built specifically to get people from the suburbs into Lower or Midtown Manhattan. AM/PM peak ridership has been in decline since the late ‘80s. And now that we don't have to be in the office as much, we need to shift to better all-day coverage.
The value of QueensLink isn't that you can get to the airport faster—which you can—it's that you can get through Queens, both faster and in ways that you couldn't before. It's a cross-town connection that connects to all these different lines. You're going to see people using it who would have never used transit before. The MTA has undersold the ridership potential.
Part of the reason I'm so passionate is that this is the future of Subway use in New York, and it's not all about going to Manhattan any more. The future of transit is realizing people need to get around their neighborhoods, and their boroughs, much more than they're just going to Midtown.
We're lowering and have been lowering our standards for what it means to be a modern city in this country.
One last question that I've always wondered about…why can't the M train complete the loop and become a bi-directional line?
It's not so much “Why can't it?” it's more, “Why didn't it?” There's nothing, technically speaking, that would prevent it.
Think about what the city looked like in the 1920s. The current M train is part of two different lines. It was originally an elevated line of the BMT that went from Downtown Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge, and out to Myrtle/Wyckoff.
It was called a “dummy line.” These old steam trains were dressed up to be trolleys, and they would take riders out to the cemeteries out there. It's a weird concept that we don't think about anymore. But, before people had cars, they had to go to the cemetery and mourn their loved ones. And so a lot of transit lines, like the 4, ended at a cemetery.
Middle Village, at that time, was both too hilly, and a giant swamp, and it didn't develop until the 1950s and ‘60s. We’re still talking about a time when commuters would travel to Midtown or lower Manhattan and back, so it just didn't make sense to extend this one random subway through an area that was hard to develop, that didn't take people to where they wanted to go.
The only reason it makes sense now is Flushing and Jackson Heights filled in, and there are these secondary markets that the M could serve. Given New York City's insane construction costs, it probably still doesn't make sense to extend it. But if you were able to do it for $1-2 billion, it would make a lot of sense. I used to live in Ridgewood, and I walked along that line to check it out. We’ve got the space, but we'd have to engage these communities, which are islands of Red in a sea of Blue in this city. That's not going to be fun but that's not a reason to not do it.
[Ed. Here’s a more detailed answer from the van-man himself on Reddit.]
We could make the case if we wanted to.
Exactly. Even QueensLink, which is an abandoned rail line—why hasn't it happened? There are all these reasons for it not to happen. A good salesman needs to ask the reasons why it should happen. Sometimes transit planners are scared of all of these legitimate reasons to not do something; they just psych themselves out, and they don't fight for what they believe in.
I don't want to rip on all these people who are fighting the good fight because they're up against some bad odds here, but sales training is something that I think would help a lot of these planners convince politicians to spend tax dollars.
I worked on a City Council campaign in 2021 and it was unbelievable training for me going forward because I no longer have any fear of engaging people who disagree with me, people I've never met before, and selling someone on an idea. It’s been extremely useful.
Anything you want to plug?
Sure. There’s my site—vanshnookenraggen.com—and the site where you can buy the maps I make. Stay tuned.
