[on-hold music] It's Quinn. Maybe you're like me, and sometimes you just spiral out, not just because everything is a lot all of the time, but because some part of you actually wants to do something about it. But, I mean, holy shit, where to start, right? Great news. We built an app for that. It's called What Can I Do? Even better news, it's free and it's fast. It takes just three clicks to start unfucking the world. Visit whatcanido.earth to get started for free.
[on-hold music] Things are a little tough out there, so you, our listeners, our readers and viewers all across the world, want, no, need more examples of fight and progress you can actually see, touch, and feel. And in these series of conversations, in partnership with our best friends at Run for Something, we are giving you exactly what you asked for.
Each episode features two guests, both sourced from the Run for Something pipeline and graduating classes, the next generation of American leaders. First, I'll introduce one young elected official at the state or local level who's made real measurable progress on an issue facing more Americans than ever before.
And then in the same conversation, I'll introduce a bright-eyed candidate currently running for a state legislature, mayor, city council, or school board who's similarly hellbent on attacking the very same issue in their own hometown or state.
And for all you know, it could be yours or yours next because you and I will find out together what they're working on and why, where they've made progress, where they've struggled, and how their exact tactics and strategies can be transferred to other schools, towns, cities, and states across the country. If these conversations inspire you, you can do two things today. One, find out what office you or some young person you love can run for at runforwhat.net.
Number two, find and support incredible candidates endorsed by Run for Something and other amazing organizations we support at whatcanido.earth. And last, number three, yes, there's always three, share these conversations, please. If you need this, and I definitely need this, many more people you know and don't know need this. First up today, our topic, transit. We need way more of it. We used to have more of it. We need it to be more reliable, and we need it to be more affordable.
Of course, we also need a few million more houses near transit that already exists, and we need to come to terms with how we got here. And here's a brief aside on that from Nicholas DeGen Bloom, who I had on the podcast a couple years ago and wrote in his manifesto, The Great American Transit Disaster, "Transit went from one crisis, bankrupt private ownership, to another, underfunded public ownership." Why?
He continues, "Redlining compounded transit divestment by encouraging long-term population and commercial abandonment of many neighborhoods best served by transit, and race and the white preference for highly segregated public spaces were crucial factors in the American transit disaster." Surprise, here we are, turtles all the way down.
But as always, we push forward because old systems like New York don't have elevators for most of their transit stations, and newer systems, like in Tucson, don't have funding to keep their current systems running, much less fare free. Let's meet our guests. Introducing our incumbent, New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes was born and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Following Superstorm Sandy, Andrew co-founded Bay Ridge Cares, an organization that prepared twenty-five thousand hot meals for victims after the storm. As a member of the Riders Alliance, he organized and formed the Concerned R Train Riders to fight for better service and demand handicapped accessible subway stations in South Brooklyn.
Andrew also worked with Bay Ridge Advocates for Keeping Everyone Safe, or BRAKES, and successfully pressured lawmakers to allow speed cameras in school zones, a fight he continues to wage all the way to Albany. And now let's talk about our candidate. Miranda Schubert is a candidate for Tucson City Council Ward 6. Miranda works full-time as an operations manager, on-air DJ, producer, and youth broadcasting camp counselor at KXCI Community Radio.
She serves on two City of Tucson commissions, is the founder of Tucson For Everyone, a local housing and transit advocacy group, and helped form the Transit For All coalition. So you've got two amazing humans here fighting for more, more affordable and safer transit for more of our neighbors. Let's go find out what it means for their hometowns and yours.
[on-hold music] Our first guest today is New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes. Senator, congrats on your re-election last year. Very exciting. Tell us a little bit about your district. First, thanks for having me on. Excited to chat. So I represent kind of the western coast, if you will, of Brooklyn.
I represent three hundred and forty thousand people spanning from Bay Ridge in the south by the Verrazzano Bridge, think like Saturday Night Fever, all the way up the Brooklyn coastline to the base of the Manhattan Bridge, so neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Red Hook, Sunset Park, and others in between.
And I've been in the state senate now for seven years. Okay, awesome. Does that include Greenpoint? It does not include Greenpoint. My brother's in Greenpoint. Yeah, just out of reach. Someone else's district. Gotcha. No worries. No, that's okay. We'll deal with them later. Well, that's fantastic. That's a lot of folks. That's a big responsibility.It certainly is, and it's half of a congressional district.
You know, New York is just so big. Yeah. There's 63 state senators in this state of nearly 20 million people, and so we have a lot of ground to cover. And actually, you know, apropos of the topic we're here to talk about today, I could not do my job as well as I think I do were it not for my ability to get from one place in my district to the other on public transit.
Sure. Sure. And we're gonna talk about how that has changed. I lived in New York in Manhattan 1,000 years ago, 2005, 2006, and boy, has a lot changed around transit since. In a lot of ways, what was the commissioner's name? Khan, I believe her name was- Yeah... who fought the fight against fight for bike lanes and stuff, and then obviously we had the super storm and everything since.
So lots to cover about how that's changed and especially since you have been in office. Why did you run the first time? 'Cause your first time was 2012. Is that right? I ran for the state senate in 2012. Maybe I had no business running at that time.
I just felt, you know, the state senator at that time had not been challenged for a decade, stood for things that were totally antithetical to what I believed in terms of respect for the LGBT community, for immigrants, and for someone who was arguably the most powerful Republican in New York City, one of two state senators from New York City, did absolutely nothing to make a difference in the lives of people that I thought needed help, whether that be transit or school funding or you name it.
I fell short. I came a little short that election. You know, ran 'cause everyone said I couldn't win, so in my mind, I couldn't lose, right? As long as I did better- Love that... than the people expected, I would've come out a winner, and I, I think I did. And then I ran again, you know, six years later in 2018 against that same incumbent who, you know, did not seem to learn his lesson from first go-around. And by this time, the neighborhood had changed more.
There was more diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities, and we also saw a political awakening post Trump's inauguration and the first few years of the Trump administration, Trump one, where, you know, the blue wave was a very real thing in my district, and I won a Trump district by more than 1,000 votes in that year. That's awesome. And just because they're such wonderful humans and organization and, and they're working with us on this show, Run for Something did not exist in 2012.
Started by Amanda after the 2016 election, and they were around for 2018. How did you find each other, and how were they supportive of your campaign? You know, at that time, there were a number of groups that were springing up to support candidates at all levels of government and to really just give us the tools to say, "Hey, you can run for office.
You can make a difference in your community, and we're here to help you. We're here to help you answer your questions. We're here to help you fundraise. We're here to help you figure out who you need to hire, what things you need to be worried about." And Run for Something was at the top of that list. I applied for their endorsement early on after I announced my candidacy. I think it was, like, end of 2017 or very early 2018 to their program, and just the wealth of resources was phenomenal.
But more importantly actually, they sent volunteers our way because people said, "Hey, I wanna help with some of your local candidates." Mm. And they sent us a bunch of volunteers, including people who I ended up hiring on the campaign trail and then ultimately hiring in my government office after I won.
And but for Run for Something, those staff members and those team members would not have been a part of what we were able to accomplish. That's amazing. I love it. They really do tremendous work. Do they win every race? Not by any stretch, but I don't know if you subscribe. Amanda sends an email every week, and it is basically a list of all the amazing folks like yourself who are running or have run in, from school boards to sheriffs to city councils, you name it.
She will go after any office, and it's fucking awesome, and it's just one line, "Hey, this is the first person elected of this ethnicity," or whatever it might be, "to come after," you know, again, snap. You name it, because they were on it themselves, or they were evicted themselves, or whatever it might be. And it is so fucking uplifting and necessary, and that's... I wanna shine a light on you folks m- more than ever.
That's the one, one of the few emails I look forward to at the start of my work week every single week is getting- Yeah... her real feel-good update. It's great. Yeah. No, it's the best. Okay, I wanna talk about transit today, and again, that's obviously one of those issues that people can touch and feel. We're all affected by it, whether you have public transportation available to you or you're
a walker or a biker, or you don't, and you're in car hell. But it's obviously dramatically complex. It's a bit of a hyper object, right? But it does apply to you in some way, and your neighbors, whether you're in Idaho or Arizona, like the candidate we're gonna talk to, Colonial Williamsburg like me outside, or Brooklyn. It really matters. So you have come at transit from some very specific perspectives. Talk to me about
which ones and why, and where have you seen measurable progress? Yeah. So I am a public transit rider. I take the subways very often. I take the bus, uh, not as often, but still pretty often. I grew up taking, you know, mass transit, really crucial to how I lived in Brooklyn, how I live in New York City, how my kids get around, how my family gets around.
When I ran for office in 2018, this was coming off of the infamous 2017 Summer of Hell when, because of such a crucial lack of investment in the nuts and bolts, literally nuts and bolts, of the- Yeah... New York City transit system, the system was coming apart. Breakdowns on the tracks, fires on the tracks, delays and delays.
The governor at that time, Cuomo, was, you know, was known for saying, "Oh, it's not my MTA," you know, "It's not my responsibility." Bullshit, of course it's your responsibility. You're the governor of New York. You control the majority of the appointments. And it was just miserable for tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who relied on that system. And so when I ran in 2018, I actually, one of my-Key planks was public transit.
I had this rider-first platform where we talked about trying to make the tr-transit system reliable and accessible and accountable for everyone. Now, what that meant was, number one, increasing investments into the operating needs of the transit system to make sure that it had the funding to run the trains that it needed to run, to run the buses, to repair the buses, to repair the tracks, to put the new signal upgrades in so that trains could run faster.
Increasing investment would make it more reliable. Number two, making it accessible. [upbeat music] Imagine this: you get some goddamn notification about something you give a shit about, and you just wanna stop what you're doing, whatever you're doing, and actually do something about it. You can't just live out here on the receiving end of these things. So you head to whatcanido.earth, and boom, right in front of you is our new intelligent starter action section.
Front and center, exactly the action you want and need to take right now. Head to whatcanido.earth right now to check it out, because the world won't unfuck itself. [upbeat music] New York City, the subway system, we have four hundred and ninety-two, ninety-four, ninety-four subway stations. Right now, only about thirty percent, maybe a hair more than thirty percent, are accessible.
So if you have mobility issues, if you're in a wheelchair, you can't get around, you're pushing a shopping cart, or like parents we are, like, you're trying to push a stroller and get on the subway, it is a near impossibility for you to access the lifeblood of New York City, which is the transit system.
And so you-- particularly in the outer borough communities that I was running to represent and that I still represent, you know, there's elevators all over Midtown, right, so that everyone in Midtown gets an elevator. If you're out in Bay Ridge, good luck, right? Right. If you're out in Bensonhurst, good luck, right? And so I really made accessibility and pushing for more elevator accessibility key.
At that time, there were eighteen subway districts in my Senate district that I was running to represent. Not a single one was accessible. It's crazy, and at least at that time, like, y-yours was the more affordable part of New York City, right? Yes. And obviously that keeps making its way outwards, but it's crazy, and this is why Amanda and I, all we do is text about our kids and about someone please just run on, like, a families first platform in New York.
It's crazy. Oh my God. Yeah, absolutely. And at this time, by the way, I didn't have kids. I wasn't a parent. So I just knew from hearing from other people, from knocking on doors, and from seeing other people literally struggle up and down the stairs to access the subway system. And then the third thing I ran on in that part of that platform was accountability. There's always been this sense that this transit system is unaccountable to the people who ride it.
And so I was pushing for this idea to give riders a seat, a voting seat, on the board- Mm-hmm... of the MTA so that they have skin in the game, and that they can vote on the MTA's budget, the MTA's priorities, the MTA's projects, et cetera. And those three things together rounded out my campaign, and I went to every single subway station in the district. I went to key bus stops. I made special campaign literature and palm cards just on my transit plan.
I took that message everywhere I could go, and it resonated with folks who felt like for too long, transit needs were just ignored because no one felt like anyone could do anything about it. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's an enormous, enormously complex system. Again, like, I've lived in London and Barcelona and Los Angeles, which its own issues, which are becoming both simpler and more complex.
But it's hard to figure out where to come at it, unless you look at something like that and go, "Elevators. I'm gonna fight for fucking elevators that are not in the majority of the stations," which is crazy. Again, you can see that even if you don't have kids or if you have a loved one that you're responsible for with some sort of disability. It's not complicated.
So seven years later, it feels like three hundred years later, talk to me about where you've seen some progress. So we've seen, I think, some really good progress so far.
Number one, you know, we have worked very hard, and I pride myself in really getting into the weeds on this, the improving the revenue streams for the MTA and increasing operating support for the MTA, which is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs our transit system, so that we could actually improve the reliability of the system, as well as increase the capital needs and the capital budget of the system, so that we can modernize it and bring it to the twenty-first century.
With something as simple as the signals that the system uses, so that a train knows when it can go and when it has to stop, some of the signals, I-- this is not hyperbole, are literally copper wires hanging around a nail in the middle of a tunnel, and we've used that system since the 1920s. What? This is New York City, right? Like, greatest city on the globe, greatest, you know, amalgamation of wealth and resources ever- Yeah, holding on by a string... in the history of...
And we are using hundred-year-old copper wires and a nail and, like, duct tape to run the transit system. And so because of things like congestion pricing, which increased support for the capital budget, we were able to start systematically upgrading and updating all of the signals. And we still have a lot of work to do, but we're making steady progress on that.
I'm really proud that on the accessibility front, in my first year in office, I got funding included in the capital plan for three elevators specifically for my district, where prior to that, not a single station had an elevator in-district. Now, in the most recent capital plan that we just approved, we got funding to build an elevator at the tallest subway station in the country and the third tallest or the second tallest in the world, which is in Carol Gardens, Brooklyn.
Mm-hmm. It's a hund- ninety-five feet up in the air.Does not have an elevator, and you rely on your feet or a broken escalator. We now got funding for a new elevator there, which we should see come online in the next couple of years. That's incredible. That's progress. What's the damage on an elevator these days? What are we looking at? For that elevator in particular, you're looking at about $150 million. Wow. Yeah.
Because the Natalie in particular has really complex engineering design issues because you can't- you're building, first of all, a hundred feet up. You have to build it in a way so that you can still collect the fare revenue, have it be secure, have it be steady. You gotta do it on both sides of the platform. You need two elevators, one for each side.
So those costs add up. You know, but for your average elevator, you're looking at anywhere between $20 to $50 million. And people scratch their heads and say, "Oh my God. Why is that so expensive?" And it, it is expensive, but you're also digging underground for the vast majority of these elevators.
In New York City, you're digging through gas pipes and electric wires and water pipes and, you know, hundred-year-old artifacts of God knows what. Like, it's complicated to dig these things, and you gotta do a lot of it. These costs add up. Despite those costs, though, we've actually worked to bring those costs down. This is why. Up until a couple years ago, the MTA would bid out each elevator project one at a time, and the requirements for the elevator were, like, customized.
Custom sprockets, custom, you know, lists, custom air cushions, custom buttons, custom- Jesus. So stupid. And if something breaks down, now you gotta customize this part. The MTA has now started, they've learned this idea of, like, consolidation. They've now started to bid out five projects, 10 projects, 15 projects at once.
That has driven the cost down and also sped up the installation of these projects, which I think is a great innovation that they're now deploying, and there's still room to grow in terms of improvement there. But what a difference it's made in our ability to deliver a more accessible system.
And also just, I mean, the more you can standardize these, again, you're not gonna be able to do it for all of that, but the more you can standardize the contractors, the assembly, the parts, you're really doing a favor to your future self 'cause elevators need a hell of a lot of maintenance, especially with the traffic that you all have. So over these seven years, what sort of obstacles have you run into, people problems and more politically, logistically, whatever it may be?
And of those, what were known knowns versus, "Oh, shit, I didn't realize this was gonna be such a hassle"? You know, I think the biggest obstacle is fighting against the MTA's own reputation of being a mismanaged agency that just fails to deliver. Mm-hmm. When you talk about, "Hey, we need to save the MTA.
Hey, we need to invest in the MTA," the average person's like, "The MTA is shit. I have to take it every day. I hate it. I hate waiting. It's dirty. It's filthy." I know. "It wastes so much money. Why is my fare going up? How come it's like a black hole with this, that, and whatever?" And you get that from the average rider.
You get that from someone who's never stepped foot into a subway station but has a lot of opinions about how the subway should be run, and you get that from other legislators and other government officials who maybe they don't represent parts of New York City, but, you know, we're talking about a state agency.
A, a senator from West Chazy, New York, which is, like, as far north country as you could go, has just as much of a vote on what happens with the MTA that's primarily based in New York City and the surrounding counties as I do. Yeah. And I live in the system, right? Right. And they're saying, like, "Why should I give a hoot about the MTA when we don't even have bus service in my county? We don't even have trains in my county."
And they're not wrong in that we should be talking about expanding access. And, and I'm working on something to that point, you know, we'll get to next. But, you know, that's a huge issue to kinda combat, and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of work. And, you know, the MTA was poorly mismanaged. We've put a great leadership team in place.
We're working to change their reputation. But then COVID hits, and they had to be bailed out because no one's riding the system. Yeah. And now they're running deficits. So now we're bailing out the system, and then we're doing congestion pricing.
And congestion pricing's another billion dollars, and people have opinions about congestion pricing, which for those that aren't aware, basically we charge a fee for drivers driving into lower M- to Manhattan, and we put that revenue towards infrastructure for the MTA. And that went in place right after we bailed out the MTA post-COVID. And then the MTA had a already scheduled 10 cent fare increase. And so, you know, in everyone's mind, that's one thing to the other. Yeah.
It's hard to overcome that. But I think despite that, people realize that there would be no New York City economy, there'd be no New York State economy- Yeah... without the 5.5 million people who use that system every single day, having that system be there for them. Well, and that's the thing. It's gotta be yes, and, right? About, like, of course, all of those different parts of New York State, and I've been all over them. I went to Colgate University in the middle of nowhere up there.
You know, trying to get from Utica to Oneida and all these things, like, it's cars, you know? There's not a lot of options. And in the depth of winter, there's not much more. But also, the entire rest of the state is dependent on your economy, which is dependent on that transit system. Which, like you said, leadership, funding, political priorities, whatever it might be, has been a nightmare.
I mean, barely got congestion pricing th- through after ridiculous hurdles. But one of the things we're really focused on here, and obviously this is a huge example, but it does matter. And again, having spent time in both London and Los Angeles, I was in London before congestion pricing and after.
And it was kinda like being in college before the smoking ban in, in bars and restaurants and after in New York State. And it works, and New York knew it would work, and it was complicated, and New Jersey had their issues, and this and that. But we've seen all the tweets and such about, oh, you know, traffic is down this much, and congestion's down this much. Tell me how it has helped on the revenue side for the MTA.
Tell me about the nuts and bolts side of that. Has that been-What you were looking for? It has been a huge boon for the MTA. We designed the congestion pricing program to basically draw in roughly a billion dollars in cash revenue a year. Net revenue would be bonded out to roughly just under four times that value, so that the billion dollars in congestion pricing revenue would net us fifteen billion dollars in bonding capital that we could use for investments. Right now, we are seeing, you--
When Governor Hochul paused congestion pricing, then she restarted it, and she lowered the congestion fee, it did take a little bit of a haircut off of what the target revenue collection would be. Mm-hmm. Closer to eight hundred million and change. But we are well on path to reach that point. And so from that metric, even though it's a little bit short from the original goal, it is meeting and exceeding its goal for the new revised targets, and that money is getting bonded out.
We're already out in the bond markets, and that's allowing us to go raise the capital to make investments into the signaling network I had described earlier, new elevators, replacing platforms, putting in place new security measures, cameras, elevators, escalators, stairs, you name it.
And why it's so important, and this is, like, in the weeds of government finance and government bonding, but having a steady revenue source like congestion pricing that we know is recurring is crucial to allow us to go into the bond markets to be able to raise the money in capital debt to then invest in these projects.
If you do not have a recurring revenue source, no one will give you access to their bonds in order to make these types of investments. And so the, really the crucial piece here is recurring revenue gets you bonding revenue, and that's why this program's been so wildly successful so far. I love it.
And that's the part I feel like we have to keep hammering out loud to people because it really is the part that the most number and diversity of people are gonna touch and feel are the infrastructure upgrades. Like, you might not ever ride or drive a car into Lower Manhattan, and that's totally fine. I get it, you know. Or maybe you like to do it or whatever. But the rest of that is gonna affect just a profound number of people.
And like you said, I mean, your example, it is such a clear metaphor for America, which is without recurring revenue, no one's gonna loan you anything, which is why we don't have houses. But at the same time, it really does matter. And to prove that, and to look at other cities where it has worked that are very different, and at the same time, what is transferable and go, "If you just turn this on, we can prove that it works 'cause it has worked in other places," that can go a long way.
What else? You worked on speed cameras, I believe. Is that right? Around schools, which really... Schools, lunches, s- cars speeding by schools all makes me flames out of my face angry. So tell me, why did you go after that, and how is it working? So I was involved in the creation of the very first pilot program to set up automated speed cameras in school zones. We started in twenty thirteen. We started with twenty cameras from seven AM till four PM on a very limited basis.
And in fact, we had to convince the guy that I beat ultimately, but who I lost to in twenty twelve, to support the program because he was opposed to it. He was the one that let twenty cameras go through, and over time, that steadily grew to about a hundred and forty cameras. The cameras were up for renewal in twenty eighteen. They wanted to expand the number to two hundred and fifty. He was opposed, did not want to expand the cameras, was adamant that he was not going to expand the cameras.
As someone who worked on the creation of this program and whose family was impacted by a traffic death, my grandmother lost her twelve-year-old daughter to a traffic crash way before I was a thought, right? Yeah. But that memory and that impact has still trickled down to affect my family today. Street safety was a huge issue in my twenty eighteen campaign.
So while everyone is campaigning about the Blue Wave and about Trump, and I did all of that, and immigrants' rights, and LGBTQ rights, and all this stuff, I was also hyper-focused on, like, this guy in office is literally making it more dangerous for our kids, for your kids to walk to school safely. Yeah. And that is just untenable. Yep. And so we won on that issue. My first year in office, we expanded the cameras to six hundred cameras.
We expanded the hours to be u- up until ten PM, and then over the years have succeeded in expanding the program so that now we have two thousand cameras in New York City operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The results are incredible. You know, if you get caught with a speeding ticket once, you will not get caught again. Eighty-one percent of the drivers never get caught again because they learn their lesson. It has dropped speeding by school zones by sixty-seven percent. Wow.
And it has been wildly successful at helping to improve street safety, even though we still have a problem of repeat reckless drivers who, you know, this solution doesn't work for, but we have other ideas that we're trying to target specifically for that group of folks. But by and large, the vast majority of speeding cars slow down when they get just one speeding ticket, which is exactly what we thought was gonna happen. Sure.
And one measure isn't gonna accomplish all of the things, but it can really start to go a long way. And again, it's lives saved. I've got a... My old swim coach from Colgate University, side example, twenty-five years later up in Richmond, Virginia, up here, which has a lot of traffic fatality issues around the university and everything. He spent ten years raising money to build this amazing pool complex that's funded in part by the city of Richmond and private money and all these things.
And their whole deal was, "We're gonna teach every second grader in Richmond how to swim." Full stop.And they've got a list, and at this point it's 7,000 kids or something like that. And if you know the number of drowning deaths among children, which is like still top three, I think, causes of death for kids under 12, you can do the math on that and just look and go, "This isn't saving everyone 7,000 times whatever. They've probably saved 50 lives, flat out. Full stop." Definitely. That's it.
So it's not at all, but that stuff can go a long way, so I really do appreciate that. As you continue to work on traffic stuff and everything else, who are your most frequent allies, whether they are other people in the state senate, the legislature, groups on the ground, advocacy groups, citizens, whoever it might be, that you can look forward to?
Yeah. So we have a great coalition of outside groups, and I have a lot of great colleagues. I don't wanna start mentioning some and then forget some, and then I get a phone call. Yeah, totally. But we do have a good bench of legislators who care about these issues, street safety, public transit, investments in transit, and reducing our reliance on private cars.
There, there is a great constellation of outside organizations that whether they are transit-focused, like the Riders Alliance or the Straphangers Campaign, or they do transit policy work like the Regional Plan Association, or they care about livable streets and livable cities, you know, Open Plans and Open New York, which cares a lot about housing and, and you know, livable communities.
We also... My campaign was really the first time that street safety in particular, at least in New York, became an electoral issue. That idea of my opponent stopping the speed camera reauthorization really galvanized a political action movement specifically of street safety advocates, which took root in New York City in that year, has since grown to support many other candidates, has now branched out statewide, and they're developing chapters across the state as well as across the country.
And so Streets PAC, uh, you know, was really a crucial organization to our efforts, as was an organization which now has taken hold c-across the country, which is Families for Safe Streets. Families for Safe Streets is the best organization you never, ever wanna be a part of because it is an organization of people who have lost loved ones to traffic crashes. Yeah. And they are phenomenal human beings who you wanna spend all your time with, but never wanna spend time with.
They have figured out how to take their personal tragedies and their pain and turn it into real action, mobilization on the ground, legislative advocacy, victim support services. If I have a traffic crash in my district, my first call is to Families for Safe Streets and says, "Hey, we have another one. Can you guys connect them to some help? Can you help this family navigate?"
That organization has now gone national. There is a phenomenal New Yorker article that I'll recommend to your listeners- Mm-hmm... about the history of Families for Safe Streets that really, I think, captures the entire story, and they've only been around for just about a decade.
So they've been a huge part of our efforts as well, and you know when you get them involved in a project up in Albany that people listen 'cause it's very hard to turn your face from someone holding a picture of their eight-year-old son who was mowed over by a speeding car chasing their ball down the street. Yeah. It's very hard to look away from that. For a while, we kinda had a little tagline for this whole endeavor called Science for People Who Give a Shit.
Kinda broadened it out now because science is in everything, and as I say, there, f-fortunately and unfortunately, there's a lot more people who give a shit about, about this constellation of things that from public health to street safety to poverty and vaccines than ever before. And part of that does include folks like, I have a very good friend named Jay Scott. He runs an organization called Alex's Lemonade Stand, named after his daughter who died of pediatric cancer 20 years ago.
An organization he never wanted to start, never wanted to run, still questions whether he wants to run with his wife, would love to put himself out of fucking business, but you have to listen to him, and he knows that people are gonna listen to him. And there's a lot of folks like that, and they don't wanna do it, but they have to do this job. And that's why a lot of my conversations with people who come in maybe with big money or something like that and say, "Should I start something new?"
I go, "There's usually some incredible people doing this who just need your support." And that sounds like one of those organizations. Again, would be great if they just could not have to exist, but here we are. And so I'm thankful for them and thankful for your support with them. So this is a big piece of the puzzle, and then I'm not gonna keep you too much longer.
You're in a unique situation as for, you know, representing part of Brooklyn and New York City and, and part of New York State. That said, what are some lessons, tactics, strategies, whatever you have picked up in the past seven years that you find might be most transferable to other U.S. cities, states of really any size, U.S.
streets of any kind, that you might feel other folks can find useful? It's a great question 'cause, you know, each battle's been a little bit different and has required a different, you know, tactical approach. But I think over the course of my last seven years, I've been able to amass a good arsenal of tips and tricks. If you're trying to, you know, persuade outside advocacy, those personal stories, whether it be from someone like Families for Safe Streets, or it could be from...
You know, we have a group in New York called the Elevator Action Group that, you know, has really been organizing for accessibility at stations, and they give personal testimonials. "I can't go to my doctor because I can't get my wheelchair up the stairs, down the stairs." Those stories are really key and crucial for building the narrative as to what the problem is, and you cannot ignore the, the power of those personal testimonials.
And if you yourself have a personal connection to a story, all the better. That really goes a long way. The other thing I'll say is when you're trying to work the inside game, whether you are an elected official or you're an advocate who is trying to play the inside and outside game, you know, we live in this moment where nuance is lost and nuance is dead, and no one wants to know about the details and the specifics, right?
But I think there is incredible value to paying attention to the details and to understanding how things work.The way we were able to successfully push through funding for the MTA is because I spent time studying the MTA's finances and how it works and how it doesn't work, so that when I encountered a legislator or even an outside person who was like, "Ah, no, it's just more money after bad," and I could actually refute that with facts and say, "Look, I hear you, but here's actually how it works."
Or a legislator who said, "Oh, we're bailing out the MTA again. They can't get their finances in order." No, I'm sorry. COVID, which no one expected, blew a hole in their finances because the New York City transit system is the least publicly subsidized transit system in the country. But we have to publicly subsidize it when there's no one riding the system. And then afterwards, we had already scheduled, come due, a discussion on the capital budget plan.
And once you're able to kind of get into the weeds on that and set people right, you don't give them refuge to hide behind their misinformation or their willful ignorance. Sure. Yeah. And that's really key as well. And, like, I know we're all trying to simplify things and fit things into 140 characters and, like, the pithier the better, and no one cares about details, and just say whatever you want.
There's value in that in political communication and political rhetoric, but you gotta know the details really well if you actually wanna move the needle or move the ball down the field, whether that's one yard or 100 yards. Yeah. No, absolutely. Really helps to have done your homework. It's so weird. Amazing. Who would've thought our teachers were so right? Yeah. God, I know. My kids are so annoyed by that. I'm like, "No, I promise you,
if you show your work, it doesn't just help your grade. Like, it'll teach you something." And they're like, "That can't be true." I'm like, "Okay. Well, good luck." All right, I don't wanna keep you much longer. I have two questions I ask everybody. One is, what's one book you'd recommend to our audience? And it can be about transit or New York, or it can be about dragons. I don't care. What do you love?
Or that you're reading to your kids. That's always a good one. Oh my God, what am I reading to my kids? Mm-hmm. You know, I wish they made a kids version, a toddler version of The Power Broker.
I don't know if there's, like, a normal person version of The Power Broker. No. But I do think, you know, for anyone interested in how power works, any of the Robert Caro books, the Lyndon Johnson books or the Robert Moses book, The Power Broker, phenomenal explorations of the use of political power and how things and why things are the way they are today, and how you can learn from the abuses of those powers.
I still swear by those books, and I often find myself going back to rereading portions of them to either understand why something is this way today or to figure out how did this happen or how can we avoid this type of scenario. Um, so- No, I mean, the Lyndon Johnson ones, it's so important to understand, like, how and why did we get here, and those ones are incredible and just so drastically illuminating for what we're seeing today.
And specifically on those books, if you are at all interested about, like, the John F. Kennedy assassination, the 63 pages that make up the chapter on Dallas in The Passage of Power, which is the most recent book that came out 10 years ago, arguably the best s- you know, story, narrative about John Kennedy's assassination I've ever seen and ever read. Amazon, in fact, sells it as a standalone e-book chapter because it is that good.
So for those folks who are interested in that story and never heard about that story or read that story and just knew that Kennedy was assassinated, it's only 63 pages. Highly recommend that as well. Great. Okay. And last one, are there any playlists that you can't get enough of right now that you might wanna tell people about? What are you listening to? Oh my gosh. I mean, I have a dinosaur playlist saved on my Spotify.
I have a dinosaur lullaby playlist saved on my Spotify. I have a Blippi playlist saved on my Spotify. Yeah. And, you know, I, I'm, I'm not really great with, you know, the most recent pop culture. Mm. But ever since the whole thing blew up about Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl- Mm... I started listening. I wanna, like, what's the big deal? Like, I've never listened to Bad Bunny music. Yeah.
I have been listening to Bad Bunny radio on Spotify when I'm on the subway going to and from the city, just so I can appreciate the music that everyone's lighting their hair on fire over. And it's great. Yeah. It's amazing. But- It's, he's, he's incredible. His story's amazing, from uploading tracks on SoundCloud while he was, like, a dishwasher or whatever to now. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. Yeah.
Senator, can't thank you enough for your time. Thank you. Anything else you wanna share with the people before we get you out of here? No, but anyone that listens that ever wants to reach out, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at A. Gounardes. Would love to hear from you guys, and if you're working on things that you think are interesting, I'd love to learn about it. Awesome. Rock and roll.
[upbeat music] My guest for this portion of the conversation is the great Miranda Schubert. Miranda, can you tell us what office you're running for and where? I'm running to be a city council member in Tucson, Arizona. Here in Tucson, we have wards, so I'm running to be the Ward 6 representative on Tucson City Council. Okay. How many people will you represent? Gosh. Yeah. Close to 90,000. 90,000 constituents.
[laughs] Yeah, that's decent. Yeah. That's decent. Okay, awesome. And so you said there are six wards, is that right? That's right. Or you're Ward 6. Yeah, and- Okay... and our ward, our ward is the best. No, just kidding. Um, but it's in the middle- Sure. No, we're not cutting that out, by the way. Sorry... it's in the middle of Tucson. Mm-hmm. So it touches the other five wards, so I like to call it the heart of Tucson. Sure. Yeah. I think that's how most people refer to it.
Did you move there, uh, to that specific ward on purpose, or th- is this where you found yourself in the heart of Tucson, and you said, "Now I want, wanna represent it"? Why this ward? I moved to Tucson over 14 years ago, and Ward 6 also encompasses the university and downtown, so it's just naturally where I gravitated as somebody who has been car-free for most of my adult life. The dream. That's great. Yeah. For me, it's the dream. Yeah. No, I get it.
We got one of the new VW Buzzes, the bus, the new version of the bus, 'cause I've got three children with just so much stuff, and I'm in downtown Colonial Williamsburg. Different than downtown Tucson. Not as much transit for all. Very walkable. Very walkable. But-So much stuff I bet it's really cute, or I bet the- It is very cute... I bet the bus is cute. Yeah It is. I really-- I'm very annoying to everyone here.
I would love more adorable electric trolleys. There's one. It's not electric. We're working on it. We're working on it. It's a whole different side conversation. We don't have a lot of revenue, the proper city of Williamsburg, because the proper city hasn't grown in four hundred years, and most of the land is owned by Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Great.
Doesn't pay property taxes. College of William & Mary, awesome. Doesn't pay property taxes. A bunch of really historic churches, great. Also doesn't pay property taxes. And then there's, like, some houses. So when you're like, "Hey, we would like to do this thing," they go- No wonder... "Great. Would you like to pay for it?" So it's complicated. That is so interesting. Mm-hmm.
I mean, we have something similar in Tucson where we have a ton of unincorporated area in the city's sort of outskirts, and all those folks are coming into Tucson and, you know, in basically every way are Tucson residents, but don't pay the same taxes that you pay when you're in the city limits, so- Mm-hmm...
yeah, it drags things down, right? Your infrastructure's being used. You're trying to shore up, like, these amenities for the public good, and- Sure... you're in a constant state of scarcity. It's frustrating. I just spent a week at the YIMBY Town Conference up in Connecticut, which was great, and it's so wonderful to hear. I mean, it's just a bunch of people who are criminally underpaid trying to get other people houses and transit, right?
It's amazing, and everyone is there 'cause they're trying to make the most nuanced, like, feet in the door for their respective municipality or state or whatever it might be, and it was inspiring, and it was wonderful. But you also learn, as weird as the situation is here, everybody's got their own shit, right? As much as there's, like, transferable things for everybody, it's complicated everywhere.
Things are always more complicated than they seem, and I wanna go to a YIMBY thing so badly 'cause I helped to start the first chapter here in Arizona. The first- That's awesome... actual YIMBY action chapter. So I'm always looking at the conferences like, "I wish that were my job," but it's not my job yet. It's not your job yet. I'll tell you what, though. I was sitting in one meeting. First thing, huge introvert.
This is as much, like, social energy as I get for the week, and then I'm done. Don't love conferences. This was amazing. It was fantastic. It was my first time, and also, as much as you have a bunch of people in, like, random advocacy groups and city governments and this and this, sitting in one breakout session, guy raises his hand, he goes, "Well, I'm the mayor of Ithaca, New York, and here's what I'm dealing with." I'm like, "Good for you for just coming." Mm. That's so cool. You know?
But, I mean, what is more, a more specific application of his job than to go spend four days, like, learning from other cities and other people who are struggling and/or succeeding with that stuff? I was like, "Fuck yeah, man." That's where it's at. That's where my obsession is. Yeah. So don't know where the next one is. They're taking RFPs. Could be Tucson. Very exciting. Ooh. Can you imagine?
I mean, we do have fare-free public transit here, so... What a great segue. I love it. That sounds amazing. Let me pause for one second. Please do. You ran for this office in 2021, which- Yeah... as listeners know, was 1,000 years ago. How did that go, and why are you running again? It did not go that badly. I mean, I learned a lot. I didn't even know what I didn't know at the time.
If I had, then maybe I wouldn't have done it, so it's kinda good I didn't. But we earned 28% in a primary against a longtime pretty popular incumbent.
And so for the remaining time between then and now, you know, I've been pretty single-handed about, you know, what can I do to really prepare myself for this role and to be the kind of representative that I really think can push forward the changes that we wanna see at the local level, which is, again, like how you were saying, the things you can feel, the things you can touch, like- Mm-hmm...
the literal roads you're traveling on, like how you're getting from point A to point B. Do you have dignity? Do you have pretty things to look at when you're going outside? You know, all that jazz. Is it a good place to raise a family, right? Yeah, no, 100%. Let me ask you, and this isn't too much of a side journey. I'm actually trying to keep things on track, which is not my MO typically.
When did you decide to run the first time, and secondarily, when you didn't win the first time against this incumbent, did you immediately go, "I'm coming back for that guy," or did you have to be talked into it? What was the process like? 'Cause here's the thing. We also get feedback from people when we say, "Have you ever considered running for local or state office?" And some people are like, "Absolutely not.
No one will like me," or, "I'm scared of the result," which is understandable, or, "I don't understand enough about it." Hearing from folks who've not only run once, but learned a lot but didn't get the office, let's say, and have decided to do it again, I think that's very interesting and could be very helpful for folks. So do you mind talking through that real quick? Not at all. It's one of my favorite things because I want people to see me doing it and go, "I could do it, too." Yeah.
There are so many different reasons to talk yourself out of it, and I feel like, you know, I'm a little weird for wanting to do it because when I lost in '21, it was immediately like, "I'm gonna wanna do this again," once the sort of the dust settles. If we did that well this time- Mm-hmm... and knowing all the things that we could have done differently, I mean, the reason I originally got interested in running, you know, 2020 was a lot, right?
I mean, for a lot of different reasons. I was working at the university at the time, you know, when the pandemic hit, and I was an academic advisor working one-on-one with students. I had, like, hundreds of students on my caseload. Mm-hmm. You know, the pandemic hits. We didn't know what we had coming.
We had a university administration who was more concerned about making sure that they were collecting tuition and trying to keep things as normal as possible, you know, and I'm like, "Okay, I literally have students who are crying on Zoom to me about the fact that both their parents have COVID and they need to drop their classes and go home to work, but their professor's not giving them leniency."
You know, you get mad, or you do something about it, and there were some activists on campus that were getting organized together into an ad hoc group called the Coalition for Academic Justice, and that was really such a saving grace for me to try to navigate sort of the pandemic and all the different layers ofThe ways that it was affecting us on different levels, like having all these like-minded, you know, folks from student workers and grad students, you know, working as TAs all the way to, like, tenured faculty.
So it's wall to wall. So it started as an ad hoc group. We ended up unionizing Labor Day of 2020, and it was just, like, a really heady time. Like, I was part of the steering committee, so we were really laying the groundwork of, "Okay, what does it even mean to organize as workers on a university campus that's incredibly, like, hostile to unions and run pretty conservatively?"
It's that weird university thing of, "We're liberal," but actually we're run very conservatively, and the Koch brothers have money on campus and all this jazz. Right.
And so I think the union, combined with the Black Lives Matter George Floyd protests in the summer and the sort of introduction in my mind of the conversation around city budgets- Mm-hmm... and how city budgets and policing impacts community safety, and the way that this profession has been, you know, sort of fed into over the years and wanting to be a part of shifting that dynamic, it led me to start watching city council meetings.
And it's so funny to me, like, the cognitive dissonance between the qualities that you probably need to have in order to want to run for office versus the ones to govern- Mm-hmm... at the local level, 'cause they're, like, pretty different. And, like, I think that a lot of people get caught up in the campaign stuff, and it's like, "Oh, I think I'm really good at talking to people," or, "I think people will like me," or, "I'm charismatic," or this or that.
Like, I was not thinking about any of that stuff. It was really a very pragmatic, "This is something I want to do. I'm really passionate about putting work into trying to bring people together, and somebody's gotta be the leader." It's less of a, "Look at me," and more of a, "Well, somebody's gotta fucking stand up and be like, 'Hey, guys, let's go do this thing.'" Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah.
I have a very sort of horizontal and less hierarchical view of the way that leadership should be working, and it's like shoulder to shoulder, you know? I'm not here to dictate to folks or be the one in the room who's the smartest. So yeah. I think local office is where we can really undermine those kinds of dynamics.
And, like, at the end of the day, there are so many people who are so... You know, they're struggling to make ends meet, right? Half the people in line at Campus Pantry are workers at the university of real jobs. The only way they're gonna get ahead is if we change the system because it is rigged against regular people. Oh, yeah. Like, it just is. No. Yep. No.
Fully, purposefully, and obviously that's becoming even more apparent every day how deep that goes. I'm in a heavily military armed forces area, obviously, in every version you can think of. And, you know, in the past couple weeks with the shutdown, they're some of the first ones in line at the soup kitchen. Levels of anger. Tell me, how did you... For the first time, and then again this time, how did you and Run for Something find each other? Oh, gosh.
I think the first time, I was lucky enough to know somebody who knew about Run for Something, and so I applied for that endorsement in 2021. I mean, just the second that, that I was introduced to the concept of it, it was just like, "Fuck yes. This is where it's at." It's something that I am constantly talking to people about here in Tucson. Like,
right now the ballot returns for our local race, like, ballots are in mailboxes. Election's on November 4th, but early voting has started. Vast majority is 65 plus. When you look at our leaders who are in office, like, two of the people that I'm running alongside for the other two wards that are up for election, Selena and I together will lower the average age of our local city council by 20 years.
And I'm 41. Like, I barely even meet the cutoff. Yeah. No. I mean- So-... rinse and repeat everywhere. Yeah. For sure. I almost didn't ask, like, for the Run for Something endorsement this time around 'cause I assumed I was too old. Well- It's like when you look around at any political fundraiser, it skews really old.
So it is, "Oh, shit, I am still young in comparison." Anybody who's running any political fundraiser, any HOA meeting, any city council meeting, any board of supervisors meeting, that's it. That's who can show up. That's who does show up. That's who's most likely to be either paid or just straight up manipulated on the internet to show up. That's it. Unless you work on it. Unless you work on it. Unless you work on it. So the...
There are changes happening here in Tucson. There was a pretty landmark neighborhood association board election in which the challenging slate garnered over 240 votes. We're talking about a neighborhood association. [laughs] Like- That's awesome... everybody got involved, and the board is much more representative of the median age of Tucson, which is 35. Yeah. It's a disconnect. Mm-hmm.
My HOA has a solar manifesto coming from me shortly that they don't know is coming. I'm pretty excited about it. You gotta get in the weeds, man. You gotta do the work- Oh, the best... if you wanna change these dynamics. Yeah. That's it. If you don't show up, who will? Let's talk about transit. You and I talked a little bit about that. It's why we're here today.
Obviously, like housing or climate change or food, you can come at this 7,000 different ways. Why transit, and where in particular... I guess both where in particular in Tucson and Ward 6, but in general, what part of the transit battle are you focused on making real measurable progress that, again, people can touch and feel?
What do those outcomes look like to you? It's twofold. We have k- managed to keep public transit in Tucson fare-free since 2020. So awesome. Um, yeah. It's amazing. It was a lot of work. Initially, the reason it became fare-free was because we received COVID relief money, ARPA funds, and the merit council was pretty visionary about deciding to put that toward transit to waive fares for folks.
And so, I mean, our ridership here in Tucson has risen when many other municipalities have fallen. It's doubled our ridership. So to me, it's really about not only keeping it fare-free, but securing full and responsible funding, 'cause we don't have a dedicated source for transit funding here in Tucson.
So this is an interesting f- thing, like you said, getting in the weeds so people understand how these things work.It's so great, uh, to be even a pra- a practical idealist and say, "Fair, free transit for everybody," right? Like you said, a lot of people got ARPA funds. Some places were pretty visionary and did things like this that really helped folks, but then you have to continue paying for it.
So tell me how that is reflected in your platform. How are you gonna make that happen? Because that is the part that we wanna help people understand they can take to their cities and towns. The next part of that is, like, what's transferable from your plan, or where are you learning from- Right... to pay for that, to make it something that's long-standing? Yeah. Okay.
So, I mean, first of all, at the most, when we did have fares in place, it accounted for 8 to 10% of the total operating cost of the system. Mm-hmm. So one point that I continually make is that, like, the funding problem for transit would exist whether we charged fares or not. It's a bit of a, you know, it's the wrong tree to be barking up if we're talking about wanting to have better buses, you know, expanded routes, and more frequent service, and more comfortable.
We talk about funding a lot because we don't really have the money to pay for many of the things that we need to put more funding into. You know, the social safety net, affordable housing, shelter, et cetera, et cetera. We are in a couple of different battles here locally. One is a regional transportation plan that will set sort of funding for the next 20 years for our region.
It's a half-cent sales tax, and it, it's going to the voters in March, and it has a portion in it for transit funding, but it's not enough. Mm-hmm. So one avenue that we're working on is spreading the word that if we don't pass this, we can come back with a better plan. Okay. So unfortunately, sales tax is gonna be a part of it. The other ideas that I've been pushing have been establishing a taxing district- Mm-hmm... in areas where there's a lot of tourism and collecting fares that way.
So one thing I would say to advocates is to look beyond the fare box if the question is that public transit needs more funding, that collecting at the box, like, when a rider gets on, is a really outdated and inefficient way of collecting revenue. The infrastructure, the staffing, the enforcement, the increased interactions with transit staff, all these things drag down the ability to actually collect money, and it's not very efficient.
And it also disproportionately impacts lower income passengers. So, like, in 2022, they did a survey of the people who use public transit, and the average household income was 35,000 or less.
So I mean, it really adds up. People can say, "Oh, it's a couple bucks. Who can't afford a couple bucks for a ride on the bus?" And it's like, okay, but if you're riding it every time you have to go to work and every time you have to go home, and it, it... maybe your kid has to use the bus too because the school buses don't go out where they're from or it's easier to do it that way, I mean, it just starts to really... it starts to stack up.
And then the other argument for investing more in transit is that it generates more local economic benefit. And actually, there's a study that a professor emeritus and somebody from the city did together that's gonna be published in "The Harvard Review" that has some really compelling numbers about our streetcar line and the impacts on local economic development.
So I think it's also a matter of shifting our perspective about what are expenses, because not all expenses are the same. Some expenses are investments that are generative. Yeah. Yeah. Who are some of the other allies that you began working with in 2020, in 2021, and now, which is almost 2026, which doesn't feel real, that are on the ground?
Again, folks who are already in various offices, potential new council members or existing ones, advocacy groups. Who is helping to really do that work to find that funding? Yeah, I mean, I think right now it's the folks on council that have sort of remained on our side in the fight to, to keep fares free and to continue searching for more funding.
We have Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz and Council Member Kevin Dahl. So we have a couple council members. Honestly, I think that I really have to try to get into office because we need to be making more urgent progress on chasing down this funding because it's continuing to ratchet up in pressure. The local media has been reporting on safety incidents at transit stops and on buses in ways that are pretty misleading.
Not that those things didn't happen, but unfortunately, recently they've been linking it to fares not being charged, so sort of trying to make this false corollary between safety issues and, well, just anybody can get on the bus kind of a thing. Mm-hmm. Which there's absolutely no evidence to support.
And if anything, with fares in place, buses were less safe because of the increased conflict over things like needing to kick somebody off if they couldn't pay a fare or, you know, if the thing's not taking your dollar bill 'cause it's too wrinkled and you're holding up the line. Oh, yeah. There's a million things, right? But the other thing is that we do very much have a coalitional approach to this.
So I mean, there are more expected groups that we're working with, like Living Streets Alliance- Mm-hmm... and a local organization called Families United Gaining Accessibility or FUGA. They do, like, community bike rides. So the, kind of the transit nerd crowd, but also expanding from that to, you know, the, The Florence Project, Tucson Clean and Beautiful, you know, different nonprofits who work in different areas of, like, social justice or equity or environmentalism.
We have a growing list of organizations who are a part of supporting the continuance of fare free transit. I'm interested in connecting more with some of the tourism groups 'cause I think we need to make that bridge between the so-called business community and the nonprofits, you know, in order to really help them understand that it's good business.
It... This isn't just about being nice and, like, giving-People who don't have money, the ability to get to their doctor appointments. It's also really good for investment development. Sure. I mean, in a world where so many people
in this country are working, are renters who are working hourly jobs with no childcare if they need it, or elderly care if they need it or need to provide that, who can afford to own a car or pay the insurance, whatever it might be, who are also in the service jobs that makes these cities and economies run, especially tourism, you're gonna want them to need to get to- to be able to get to work and to be able to get home and to be able to do it safely and without having to choose, like you talked about, that wrinkly dollar.
They have just decided that this dollar is what they're gonna use to get to work, which means it's not going somewhere else. We make it very expensive to be poor in this country, and you want them to not have to make that choice, because then you can have more tourism, and you can have healthier- Yeah... citizens. All of the above. Exactly.
You know, and it is definitely the case here in Tucson that the people who make Tucson a tourist draw are the people of the s- the service industry, hospitality. They're the makers and the musicians and the artists and the artisans, you know? So it's like we gotta take care of those folks. They need to be able to get around.
The average Tucsonan right now is spending around twenty percent of their household income on transportation alone, and you are, like, in a good position if you're paying under thirty percent of your income on housing. Mm-hmm. If it's thirty percent or over, you're cost-burdened. It was so sad.
I was talking to some university students about this a while ago, and I mentioned the cost-burden thing of thirty percent, and they started laughing at me. And I was like, "So are you paying forty percent?" And they kept laughing, and then I was like, "Fifty?" It-- No, it was like seventy percent. Yeah. I just spent fifteen years in Los Angeles. We make it very expensive to live and have any semblance of wellness and
support of any kind. And it's a lot of work, too. Yeah, it is. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. People talk about free bus passes, and I'm like, "You had to go in person." Yeah. Yeah. Look at everybody getting kicked off Medicaid 'cause they've missed a form on one of the twenty fields they have to fill out every six months. This makes a ton of sense.
I really love you talking about the allies that are already there and how you start with sort of these core transit dorks and move your way out, because that is truly... We always-- When people say, "What can I do?"
If I'm talking offline or online to someone who is looking to branch into the sorta more philanthropic echelon of contributing, the first thing I plead with them to do is not to start their own thing, 'cause there's already so many people on the ground already doing these things, and they could use your funding and for you to get out of the way or maybe even your warm body if you would follow instructions.
There are already allies in most of these places doing this work because usually they have to. And so I love always hearing about that because it's very easy for folks. You know, look, man, you haven't gone to a city council meeting. I get it. You should. You don't even have to talk. Just go to your first couple. But to get the sense of who's out here trying to make our streets safer, I get it.
I guarantee you there are folks who are doing that, and to hear yourself say, "Yes, I'm running 'cause I said, 'Fuck it, I'll do it,' and I'll do it again." But it is to be, you know, both a leader and an instrument for a lot of these groups and this broader coalition, right, who are trying to say- Oh... we have to find this funding. Or so much of what- Yeah...
we've gotten used to in the past five years goes away. That's right, and we need to expand. I mean, it's such an important and essential service for so many people right now, and it doesn't even serve... I mean, I was at the community college on the east side, and they were like, "Gosh, it'd be great if the bus went out to Vail." There's definitely students that would ride it, and we have more work to do.
Tucson is spread out over two hundred and fifty square miles, and we have a comparable population to Baltimore, and Baltimore is in, like, a fraction of maybe, like, seventy square miles [chuckles]. That's wild. I mean, that's so indicative of US cities, right, especially these, quote-unquote, "newer ones." Get them in Colina, Weemsberg, where you see, like, the sprawl, and then they're like, "Here's Paris."
And, you know, it fits in six city streets. Yeah. It's crazy, and obviously you go, "Well, how do you want people to get around?" Okay. You have been fantastic, by the way. You're killing this. I'm gonna ask you the last two questions I ask everybody before I ask you to promote your campaign. Number one, what's a book you'd recommend to the audience? And it can be anything from
one of my favorites, The Great American Transit Disaster, or it could be a coloring book or something about dragons, which is what I often read at night to turn my brain off. Either way, our listeners love it. Saving Time by Jenny Odell. Okay. This is a really fantastic book. It's about the attention economy, and it's about the way we look at time.
And so it's just a great, like, brain opener if you're feeling the crush of daily capitalist existence. [chuckles] Really beautifully written and really, yeah, just stunning. I love it. That's awesome. And my newest question, I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, but it's nice. What's one playlist you can't get enough of right now? Playlist. Mm-hmm. You're asking a radio DJ. [chuckles] Oh, I know. I'm aware.
That's why I knew you weren't gonna be allowed to back out of it. It was gonna be like choosing among your children, but I need an answer. You can do more than one. It's fine. You know, I'm gonna go with the Tucson 250th playlist that KXCI that I work at. Tucson just... We celebrated our 250th birthday, and this playlist slaps. Yes. It's very Tucson, so. Okay. Where can our listeners find it?
Is it on Spotify, Apple, YouTube? Where is it? Yeah, you can find it. You can find it on Spotify. Okay. Great. Awesome. We'll put a link to it in there. Mm-hmm. This is great. Everybody needs this stuff. You need the, not necessarily the distraction, but music makes it a little better. We need joy, though, right? Mm-hmm. We have to sustain ourselves 'cause this is exhausting. That's gonna be our lead into the show.
Me, a tired millennial running for local office. I'm exhausted because all I'm doing is obsessing over voters all the time, and how can I reach more people? No, I get it. We have this whole other parenting podcast, but it's not, as we say, it's not an advice show. It's a commiseration show. It's about parenting in these times, and it's just me and my co-host.
And most of it is just, like, long sighs, basically. So don't worry. Mm-hmm. They're used to it. That's fantastic. Tell us about your campaign. Where can people find it? How can they help out? So it's mirandaforwardsix.com, all words and the number six. Very detailed platform. You could donate.
I mean, we're trying to raise under three thousand more dollars in order to close out the campaign, so we are right there. Election day is on November fourth. I'm a climate champion who's against data centers. I'm pro-transit, pro-housing, pro taking care of people, you know? Pro compassion. Miranda, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. That's it for this week, and I hope you loved these conversations and people as much as I do.
Huge, huge, huge thanks to our partners at Run for Something for all of their hard work every day, but also to bring these conversations to life. As always, this conversation was produced and edited by Willow Beck. Reminder, you can find candidates who are endorsed by Run for Something and other awesome organizations we trust at whatcanido.earth.
If you or someone you love is under forty and wants to run for something at the state or local level but doesn't know what's available, head on over to runforwhat.net. And if you wanna know more about our work, read our newsletters and essays, check out our other podcast, or even get some of our awesome T-shirts, hoodies, stickers, or coffee mugs, head to importantnotimportant.com. Thanks for listening, and thanks for giving a shit.