How do transportation planning organizations’ narratives guide discourse and results? This chapter shows how agencies merge quantitative forecasting and policy stories while building advocacy constituencies, revealing more of the underlying real transport social structure proposed from a UK context (Melia, 2020). Informed by critical realism, this study clarifies the mechanisms that lead to neo-advocacy planning, a concept developed by Gavin Parker and Emma Street as a response to the challenges of planning in neo-liberal contexts. In this chapter, I use the term neo-advocacy planning as an inverse of public opposition to agencies, where government agencies strategically leverage community groups through organizational communication that supports public opinion for their leaders’ dominant lobbying and voting constituencies.

‘No tolls on existing roads’ read one of many hand-written protest signs at the public meeting of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO)—the intergovernmental transportation group for the fast-growing Austin, Texas region. Crowds had gathered in a cool and dark auditorium in Anderson High School—moved from the normal small meeting room on the University of Texas campus—for the board's October 2007 vote on whether to include five toll roads in the region's transportation plan. Some shouted threats of ‘political suicide’ to the elected representatives on the board, led by then-state senator Kirk Watson (Wear, 2007). As a regional transportation planner for the organization at the time, I primarily analyzed land use and transportation data, and staffing events like this were also part of the job.