This Guy Transits | Denis Agar | 6

Um, but I want to talk about your career a little bit cause you actually worked in planning and you mentioned as well that a lot of the time we hold ourselves back, um, because of like perceived opposition or anticipated opposition to things.

And I see this all the time with the city of Calgary, uh, they are constantly like, well, well, we should dial it back because we're nervous about what so-and-so and so-and-so from the public will come out and say.

And so then they're kind of pre-compromising.

And then because they pre-compromise, then the people who are opposed are opposed to the pre-compromise.

And then they have to compromise on their previous compromise.

Is that something that you saw in your career as a transit planner?

It is the bane of my existence.

I've never used that term pre-compromising, but I think, you know, what do people say on social media, like capitulating in advance? Like it's so common when it comes to things that city staff are responsible for, like things that they might not want to rise to the level of council.

So like these like little smaller decisions that city staff are always making all the time.

You know, they've been trained.

Often a lot of the people that are responsible for this stuff were trained as engineers.

And so in engineering school, you're taught to think a certain way about cars.

Your job isn't to... you know, change how many cars there are.

Your job is to just accommodate them and let them flow.

Um, and so that's kind of the education that you came out of.

And then you're in this, this work environment where it's very risk averse.

And the last thing you want is for you to do something that gets the attention of council, because then they're going to be mad and, you know, they'll start, you know, tromping in the flowers and changing all these things.

Like it's, it's really kind of a public servants, uh, you know, prerogative to just kind of stay under the radar.

Um, and, uh, you know, even staff like senior leadership at municipalities, they don't want, uh, to, they're, they're accountable for these decisions.

And if it becomes political, then, you know, they could be fired or transferred or, you know, whatever.

Um, so there are all these forces that are, are encouraging, uh, municipalities to, to capitulate advance on, on things like, um, Things that have, you know, very acute impacts on a small group of people.

So, like, the example that really made a big impression on me was in West Vancouver, which is kind of a wealthy part of our region.

There was a proposal to extend one of these rapid buses into West Van.

Yeah.

You know, we were working on, this was when I was at TransLink, we were working on, I think, this kind of thing in about 13 different municipalities all at once.