Cooper & Hugo: Tomorrow’s Bike Leaders

In this conversation, we’re gonna flip the script. A few weeks ago, I got an email from two 8th graders, Cooper and Hugo, who were working on a school project about how they can help get better bike lanes in the area. I love it when young people care about civic issues – during the 2020 pandemic election, I co-led a project with some local high schoolers and Princeton students to recruit young people to be poll workers and we ended up with more than 30,000 people joining across the country. I suggested to Cooper and Hugo that we record our conversation as a podcast episode. They’ll ask me some questions. And I’ll ask them some as well. I think this is especially important because, at its essence, this is a conversation about young people who are the present and future – and who don’t have the right to vote and shape policy – looking at our city – the city they live in and will inherit – and saying this isn’t good enough. And I take responsibility that I and the other adults around me haven’t made it good enough for them. If you can’t bike because it’s not safe enough and you can’t drive because you’re not old enough, there are significant limitations on your freedom. It’s also fundamentally a question we should all be asking: what does it take to have the city, the country, and the world we want? So guys, Cooper and Hugo, thanks for having this conversation with me and thanks for being interested in big questions.