Lack of mass movement spells ineffective cycle network

THERE is an hilarious video clip of a guy in a park who starts dancing by himself, surrounded by onlookers. Not just dancing, but doing wacky moves that most of us would be too embarrassed to do in public.

After a few minutes, someone else stands up and joins him. And the response of the first dancer is what changes him from a lone lunatic into a leader: he welcomes the second one by making him feel like a partner, not a follower.

They are now two people looking comfortable together, doing what looks like crazy fun. Gradually others start to join in, and the leader becomes just one of the group as the dancers beckon to their friends who are sitting on the grass.

The dancing crowd grows but at some tipping point there is a shift, when it starts to look more normal to be dancing than to be sitting and watching. The ones left sitting look like outsiders who don’t know how to enjoy themselves. They are the ones who either haven’t noticed the shift in what is now “normal”, or are not interested.

It’s a perfect illustration of how a few early adopters create a movement, not by trying to persuade anyone to do anything, but by not being afraid to be seen creating something fun that will attract others. The first few must be adventurous, willing to risk ridicule, but later that is not a requirement. After the social tipping point is reached, it is more likely that those who remain on the sidelines will be teased by their friends for not joining in. At this point, normal etiquette is up-ended and peer pressure is the mechanism for communicating the change.

It is an important lesson for advocacy groups that seek to change behaviour or win converts to a cause. It is rare that a social movement can go mainstream by appealing to altruism or morality, or presenting a logical argument for why people should change. This might work to an extent, and admittedly it is what I often do in this column, but we don’t all have the same sense of morality or social justice, so there can be a huge hurdle in changing long-held beliefs and world views.

What the dancing lunatic demonstrates is the power of creating a new “normal” that will make people comfortable with changing their behaviour.

Whether the issue is trying to stop drivers parking in bicycle lanes or fighting climate change, the challenge is the same: encourage activity that supports the common good. It’s that sense of the common, the shared responsibility for things bigger than ourselves, that is what makes community. Can community drive positive change?

One of the challenges is lobby groups that have an inordinate influence over decision makers. Government accountability is limited by the degree to which “stakeholders” become a movement, which in turn becomes the new normal. Organised groups have the clearest voice. They are able to articulate a need and develop an advocacy strategy.

A social movement is one of the checks against unbalanced pressure on government. If social change is big enough, it doesn’t need a strategy; it demonstrates an obvious need simply by being the way society has become. The only question then is whether government will notice and respond. When private motor cars first arrived on the scene, they needed lobby groups for them to be accepted, and there would have been all sorts of political pressures and negotiations over the regulations that governed their operation and the way streets were redesigned to accommodate them.

Now driving is the form of transport that overrides all else in road design, and will continue to do so unless either a new technology challenges it, or a social movement emerges that is too big for government to ignore.

Cycling is not new, but in Cape Town it is a form of transport trying to find its way. It has the advantage that municipal policy already supports it because it is seen to support the “common good”; but there is no mass movement to encourage municipal investment or design standards to be aligned with what the average commuting cyclist needs. Until there is, we’ll be stuck with an ineffective cycle network and ongoing conflict between cyclists and drivers.

Cycling is not new, but in Cape Town it is a form of transport trying to find its way