This is the tenth in a weekly series on my DC sabbatical (Sep 1 → Nov 30, 2026). Catch up on earlier posts if you missed them, and join my mailing list for future posts.
By Tuesday afternoon, I had refreshed the Polymarket elections page more times than I would like to admit (to be clear, I wasn’t betting, but it was the only thing that was changing). Nothing meaningful had been reported yet and I needed a distraction, so I called up Ryan Pecaut for a few hours of virtual coworking. I spent it going through every All Aboard Ohio member whose recurring payment had recently failed. It was an unglamorous way to spend election day, and probably one of the more valuable things I did all week.
A failed payment is such a simple problem. Someone’s card expires and the charge bounces, and unless anyone is watching, that member quietly lapses. Across an organization our size, that can add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars in lost revenue, and I would bet plenty of organizations have this happening right now without knowing it. It is exactly the kind of process an organization can put in place (and eventually automate) to stay healthy. I am lucky to have such a tech-centric team at AAO helping build these systems out.
That evening I met up with Alex for drinks as the votes came in. A quick note before this next part: this is Mitch Radakovich, private citizen, speaking. And as a private citizen, HOLY GOODNESS GRACIOUS.
As a transit advocate, I am also genuinely excited about what the results could mean for Ohio. Amy Acton will be writing the next governor’s budget, and she will appoint new directors of transportation and development, both of whom sit on the Ohio Rail Development Commission (ORDC). A more competitive statehouse should also encourage more cooperation on bipartisan issues, and passenger rail is one of them. Nearly 80% of Ohioans support it, according to ODOT’s own survey!
That said, an election is only a starting line. The real work for advocates is still ahead of us, building relationships at ORDC, in the statehouse, with business leaders, and most importantly with citizens across the state. Luckily, a lot of the organizational infrastructure we have been rolling out at AAO is built for exactly that. On Thursday I also wrote an op-ed, signed as AAO board chair, making the case for fully funding transportation and passenger rail in Ohio. We will be sending it to papers across the state soon.
Election night also brought great news from Colorado. Huge congratulations to James Flattum and the whole Coloradans for CoCo team on passing Prop 7A for the Front Range Passenger Rail District! James joined us for AAO’s first podcast episode back in September, and it has been so fun to watch this campaign come together. Colorado just showed the rest of the country what is possible.
Speaking of the rest of the country, my week started Monday morning with a call with Corrigan Salerno of the Metropolitan Abundance Project (MAP). He and his team have already been mapping transit advocacy across the country, and there is a lot of overlap between what they are building and what I am trying to do with the Statehouse Rail Network. On Wednesday, Martha Roskowski from his team followed up to interview me about what is working at AAO, as part of a series of conversations with organizations nationwide. Pulling together all the materials we use to explain AAO made me realize how many of them belong in the starter kit.
Most of Thursday morning went into restructuring the Statehouse Rail Network pitch into a dedicated pilot plan. Rather than launching nationwide all at once, the pilot starts with a handful of states at different levels of organizational maturity, so we can learn what works before expanding to larger cohorts with more funding. It also gave me a chance to clean up some open questions about how the program is governed and hosted. Alongside it, I finished a summarized version of the starter kit that shows every part of an organization the program addresses.
Then I spent the weekend finishing a national landscape assessment of transit and passenger rail advocacy organizations, including a good chunk of Sunday on the phone asking folks for advice on it. All fifty states are covered, showing where help is needed across the country and where it has already been asked for. Together, these three documents make a really strong case for the program and why it deserves funding. Now the job is to keep getting them in front of people, and the fundraising conversations continue.
Back on the AAO side, I had a call Thursday afternoon with Hunter Laube, one of the newest members of our advocacy team. Hunter rocks. He showed up with a list of great questions about how AAO works and where we fit in Ohio’s broader landscape, and he had clearly done his homework on our website. The conversation got my gears turning on onboarding. The faster a new volunteer understands the organization, the faster they can start thriving, and I think we can build much better materials to get them there. I also had a great call with Riley Gilson from our board. Riley and I are working closely on the organizational redesign, and on ways AI can help AAO operate even more efficiently.
DC kept me learning all week, too. Tuesday morning, before the election anxiety fully set in, I met with Toby Amstutz to brainstorm events DC Abundance could host in the coming months. I always enjoy talking with Toby because he keeps an eye on every abundance sector, well beyond transportation and housing. DC is lucky to have him as one of the movement’s co-leads here.
Midweek brought a beautiful day, inside and out. Back at the RPA office on Wednesday, I grabbed lunch with John Christoph, who had just spent a week volunteering in Iowa and was understandably fired up about the results. John is a literal rocket scientist, and I always walk away from our conversations having learned something cool. The good vibes lasted the rest of the day.
Later that afternoon I went to the Capital Region Transportation Forum, which felt a lot like the “State of Metro” conversations you might find in other cities. Transit leaders and officials from the District, Virginia, and Maryland talked about cooperating across jurisdictional lines. Hearing how the region’s DOTs work together reminded me of the opportunity in a place like Cincinnati, which also spans multiple states. I hope our friends at OKI, Cincinnati’s metropolitan planning organization, are reading up on what regions like this one have pulled off.
This month’s transit happy hour was Thursday evening, with young leaders from all corners of the transportation world. Many of them are familiar faces after two months here, and I love how many different worlds collide in that room.
I had a super interesting conversation Friday morning with ++Thomas Abelman++ about how organizational structure and culture determine whether a company or department reaches its goals. We agreed strongly that it does not matter what you are selling or how smart your people are. If the organization is not functional, you are set up for failure.
The National Portrait Gallery was my office on Saturday morning, where I caught up on email and reading before heading to a lightning talk session from DC Abundance and the POPVOX Foundation on building a more capable Congress. The premise was that if you care about whether federal agencies can deliver, you must look upstream to Congress, which writes the statutes that define what agencies can do. Speakers from the Congressional Management Foundation, R Street, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and POPVOX covered everything from committee dysfunction to federal budget reform. I learned so much about how Congress operates (and doesn’t). I was most excited to hear from TechCongress, which places technologists in congressional fellowships. So few congressional staffers have technical backgrounds, and that matters a lot when Congress is the body charged with regulating the future of tech.
Outside of work, Wednesday night was dinner at home with the roommates and Ryan, a former resident of the house, who told us about his work in clean energy and the connections he has made along the way. We ordered from the neighborhood pizzeria, which I somehow had not tried until now. It was excellent!!
After working from a coffee shop Friday afternoon, I met Alex for a 7-mile run. Seven miles is short by our standards, so we kept the pace quick. We refueled with Ethiopian food and multiple episodes of Veep, which is somehow even funnier now that the midterms are over. It might be one of the best comedy shows ever made. I have watched two seasons this week, I fear…
My long runs keep getting stronger, and my stamina is improving week by week. I am also back to my lifting routine. No shade to the office gym here, but it does not hold a candle to P&G’s. Still, free is free. Sunday afternoon I walked through Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo before grabbing pupusas for lunch.
This was not my strongest reading week. I am about halfway through Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg, but it has not been getting priority in my mornings. I have been diving straight into work, which honestly has not been great for my meditation habit either. On Sunday, though, I was browsing at Kramers and picked up *Abandoning a Cat*, a short memoir by Haruki Murakami about his childhood and his father. Murakami is one of the best living magical realist authors, and I planned to read just the first few pages. An hour and a half later, I was still standing in the aisle, and I had finished it. I suppose that counts as a recommendation.
Jeff Hutchins, one of our Cincinnati AAO members, came through town Sunday morning on a layover during a looong Amtrak trip from Orlando to Cincinnati. Jeff is one of the strongest cheerleaders anyone could have on their team. He was so excited to hear how life is going here, and he had great stories and advice for my last few weeks in DC. I hope he has recovered from that trip by now, and I am looking forward to seeing him back in Cincy.
That conversation stuck with me, because I am starting to feel the tension that comes with the end of a sabbatical. I am working out what life will look like on December 1st, back in Cincinnati. I will be glad to have a salary again. I am also really going to miss everything happening here in DC, and the impact I have been able to make in three months of getting paid nothing ;)
Now I am getting everything ready for a rapid week of travel. On Thursday I head to Chicago for the High Speed Rail Alliance conference, where I will be speaking Friday, November 13 on “Plug and Play Advocacy: Ohio’s Toolkit for a Statewide Rail Movement.” The next day is our statewide meeting with Carter Lavin, and on November 18 I will be aboard the inaugural second daily Pennsylvanian.
See you in Chicago!