Burned into all our minds and many memes is the Norman Rockwell image of the self-effacing man standing at a public meeting to awkwardly, but powerfully, offer his two cents on the matter. Some public meetings these days still include such standing up and solely talking before, say, ABQ City Council. There are time limits and other rules, but it’s at least pretty close to the Rockwell scene.

Conversely, transportation public meetings, at least in our area, tend to very much NOT be like the Rockwell scene ever since those stormy-on-the-way-to-riotous public meetings concerning Albuquerque Rapid Transit. You know the ones featuring scenes like where the guy climbed atop the card table and yelled that he was not necessarily in favor of ART and thought it perhaps best that everyone in favor of it should go fuck themselves.

Those were the days.

Today’s transportation public meetings, most probably including the one I’m planning to attend tonight regarding the next phase in construction along Dolores Huerta/Cesar Chavez/Bridge/Stadium Blvd. include a format centered on a “What if a jerk shows up at the meeting? schema.

Display boards are set up at safely distanced places throughout a room/gym/football stadium venue that is usually ten times larger than needed. Government and consultant folks stand at each of the boards and softly answer softly stated question from attendees, thoughtfully nod their heads while the attendee calmly tells them what they think, and then offer some form of post-it note (often a little “dot”) while encouraging the attendee to mark their place of concern on that board’s rendering and/or scrawl their comment on the post-it note, almost always using a pen that has dried out because we live in Albuquerque.

There are variations, and sometimes there’s a formal presentation before/after the dance of the display boards, but the real meat of the meeting is the gentle back and forth between attendee and government/consultant. To be honest, I like the display board dance to be first so I don’t have to stick around for any following formal presentation. Those presentations always seem to consist of a guy (almost always a guy) reading, word-for-word, a series of vague, uninformative PowerPoint slides shown on a rickety and slap-dash “screen.” Because the actual Normal Rockwell painting guy aspect of the meeting has been neutered into a post-it note, there’s usually nothing beyond a question or two from the sparse audience made necessary by the vagueness and lack of information provided on the PowerPoint slides.

While on the subject, I don’t think I’ve written before about the interesting time of day and food choices at such meetings. Tonight’s is at 5:30 (usually I’d have a link to the meeting info webpage, but, remember, I’m not doing research/links this month), and that time is typical. So, the idea seems to be, attendees are coming straight from work or are old people like me. As the thought of driving straight to a public meeting about transportation immediately after work strikes most everybody as the most awful idea ever, these meetings tend to be sparsely attended and dominated by old people like me.

So, given this time and attendance demographic, transportation meeting planners have designed a refreshments strategy centered on chocolate chip cookies, very, very, very small bags of Chee-tos, and bottled water. Depending on their willingness to appear famished/hoggy, attendees will usually grab just one of the very, very, very small bags or a single chocolate chip cookie. Having attended about 25 of these things in recent years, I’m still waiting for my first time of seeing somebody just scoop all the food items into a bag and make a run for the door.

So I grab my chocolate chip cookie, wondering which grocery store “bakery” it came from, and head from the display boards. For reasons performative and otherwise, I ride my bicycle to these meetings, and hence become “That Guy Who Rode His Bicycle to This Public Meeting on Transportation.” Most often I’m the only person playing the role. Occasionally there’s another such performer, and I’ve noticed in such cases that we, without speaking or even looking at each other, silently strategize ourselves to “attack” different display boards with our “Crazy Guy Who Rides a Bicycle to Public Meetings on Transporation” agenda of wacky ideas, such as physically-separated bike lanes and other things that might make it at least slightly less likely that we will be killed.

Writing all this, that is to say way too much, on the subject has me revising my original premise. Today’s public meetings on transportation actually ARE like that Normal Rockwell painting. There’s still the awkwardness of stating one’s opinion before folks they do not know, the awareness (at least in the cyclist’s case) that one is offering an idea that is overwhelmingly unpopular, and the underlying sensation/motivation that morally/ethically compels one to attend such meetings, even if there’s only sketchy bike parking available and this chocolate chip cookie is total crap.

In short: democracy. Like standing in that line waiting to vote Tuesday. Like the painting, but with post-it notes..