When Jeff Allen tells strangers that he’s the executive director of an organization that expands access to all kinds of electric vehicles in underserved communities, people tend to be taken aback – especially since President Trump began his second term by pledging to eradicate both the “EV mandate” and the very concept of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility from the federal government.
“Somebody said to me [the other day], ‘You do electric vehicles and you do it through an equity lens?'” he said. “You are double-screwed, aren’t you?”
Like countless transportation reform advocates across the country, though, Allen and his colleagues at the e-mobility advocacy firm Forth aren’t backing down from their mission, even if they are adjusting their strategy to meet the moment — and focusing a little more on helping communities keep their EV, e-bike, e-bus, and other e-mobility grants, rather than win new ones.
He argues that in some ways, though, the rapidly-changing political climate is prompting long-overdue conversations among advocates about how to make lives better for marginalized communities at a broad scale — rather than virtue-signaling their support for those communities without delivering much at all.
“If there is a silver lining to what’s going on, it’s that we are being forced to do some work that, frankly, we should have been doing a long time ago,” Allen continues. “A lot of us [advocates] had gotten lazy; we’ve just been throwing around acronyms like, ‘BIPOC this’ and ‘white supremacy that,’ as opposed to really showing our work. We do need to design around people who face the most barriers — because it gets us better results.”
Allen argues that transportation reform advocates will have the most success during the Trump era — and, frankly, in most communities that don’t embrace progressive language — if they take a “targeted universalism” approach to their work.
Created by the University of California, Berkley professor john c. powell (who spells his name in lowercase), Allen says the term “targeted universalism” has become colloquially synonymous with the “curb cut effect,” in which adding a sidewalk ramp for wheelchair users also makes travel easier for people pushing strollers, shoppers dragging grocery carts, or anyone who can benefit from simply having one less stair to climb.
Critically, though, targeted universalism doesn’t mean that every iteration of every solution must equally benefit every group, or that the deep differences between those groups’ respective needs don’t matter. And when it comes to reforming a transportation culture that makes constant gas-guzzling a virtual default, that nuance is important.
”Often our advocacy blinds us to the reality of people’s lives,” added Allen. “I’m a diehard bike commuter — but that’s not righteousness, that’s privilege, to use another [buzzword]. I can afford to live someplace where I can bike to work; I am not going to get fired if I’m a half hour late because I get a flat tire. … But you can’t tell somebody who’s working three jobs and trying to raise their kids that in 20 years there’s going to be a great transit system. They’ve got a crappy car right now, and they need to get where they’re going.”
Get real — and get results
Of course, Allen doesn’t argue that advocates should give up on fighting for great transit systems, even if they may take years to build — and he counts himself as a regular Amtrak user in addition to a regular bike commuter.
But he does say that everyone in the advocacy community needs to “get real” about the political climate and car-dependent transportation landscape in which they’re working, and tailor their messaging to the real people they hope to adopt green solutions — even if sometimes, that means not saying the word “green.”
“The fact that a lot of advocates have been trying to sell electric vehicles and transportation electrification as a climate change strategy, I think, was always a mistake,” Allen said. “Because very few people choose their commuting method or buy a car based on climate change. … They do it based on questions like: ‘How much time do I have? What can I afford? What’s most convenient? And then, by the way, I also want to feel like I’m not destroying the planet. But that’s pretty far down [the list].”
Those kinds of needs can be particularly urgent for marginalized people, whom many EV proponents attempt to serve simply by planting chargers in low-income neighborhoods — which then quickly become “hipster catnip” for people outside the neighborhood who “drive in, lock their doors and windows, sit in their car, charge up, and then get out … as fast as they can,” he said.
If advocates started by listening, though, they might have a very different understanding of those communities’ unique transportation challenges — and a valuable opportunity to work with them to solve them.
A downtown food delivery worker, for instance, might not be convinced to ditch her car for environmental reasons, but she would try an e-bike if she knew just how much money it could save her on gas and parking, while doubling as exercise that could help her ditch the gym. A mom with three jobs all over a sprawling metro area, meanwhile, might not be able to trade her clunker for a free bus pass, but an EV could be life-changing for her — if she stopped seeing EVs as “expensive toys for rich dudes,” and got access to great financing on a cheap model.
“It’s not just dropping hardware on people,” Allen added. “If you put a charging station in a low-income apartment building where nobody there has ever driven an EV, seen an EV, doesn’t even know anybody who drives an EV, the first reaction is not going to be. ‘Oh goodie, now we’ve got access to this technology.’ The first reaction is going to be, ‘What is this thing? Because I bet it’s going to drive up my rent.”
‘Circular firing squads’
Allen acknowledges that many advocates might be uncomfortable downplaying the language of sustainability and equity in their work, especially as revolutionary antiracist and climate movements call on them to radically center those values in everything they do. He argues, though, that these movements won’t lose their moral center by adjusting their messaging to recipients — and they will almost certainly lose their fight if they don’t.
“This is not the time to back off of our values and beliefs,” he added. “But the question at some point is, ‘Do you want to beat people over the head with your moral argument — or do you want to actually make life better for people who are impacted by that inequity?'”
Provocatively, Allen says he’d issue that same challenge to advocates for ending car dependency who have been skeptical of how electric cars might help that transition — or even opposed them as a distraction from the essential task of ending automobility. He recalls one recent interaction he had with a client about an electric car-sharing outfit in a deeply auto-oriented region of Oregon that illustrates his frustration perfectly.
“ [This person said], ‘The last thing we would want to do is take somebody who’s riding the bus and put them in an EV.’ And I was like, first of all, that’s the most arrogant, condescending bullshit I’ve ever heard; who are you to tell people how they ought to get around?” he said. “‘But second of all, if somebody’s got a two-hour bus commute with three transfers, and it costs them five bucks round-trip, and you could turn that into 20 minutes in an EV and it’ll cost them a dollar — of course we should be putting them in an EV. And if the EV out-competes transit, that’s because transit isn’t good enough. Don’t blame the EV; blame that. Fix that.”
As the Trump administration promises to make fixing transit and decarbonizing the auto fleet harder than ever, Allen says the time is now for transportation reform advocates to come together around a shared vision: “electrifying everything that moves,” which is the cornerstone of Forth’s mission, while simultaneously making movement outside a car a far bigger part of our transportation landscape.
At least for now in Washington, that might mean means emphasizing electrification’s benefits to the economy and beating China, instead of using Trump administration trigger words like “DEI” and “climate change,” which can get projects canceled before they’ve begun.
“ We need to be doing everything we can to make it easier, more convenient, cheaper to make other choices [besides driving] — but in the meantime, 80 percent of people are still traveling alone in their cars,” Allen adds. “So we need all of it — and we need to stop it with the circular firing squads of bike people versus EV people versus transit people versus pricing people.
“We are all on the same side, and now more than ever, we cannot afford to be squabbling amongst ourselves,” he continues. “That squabbling has always been frustrating. But it is lethal right now.”
