Time & Perspective Quote by Melissa Bean

Civic pride is the sugar coating; transportation pain is the real subject. Melissa Bean’s line starts by affirming belonging - “communities that we’ve built” - then pivots to a quietly pointed rebuke: the everyday dysfunction we’ve normalized. The rhetorical move is classic practical-politics triangulation: validate voters’ affection for place while separating that affection from the systems that make daily life harder than it should be.

“Lost time” and “unnecessary stress” are deliberately unglamorous phrases, almost HR-speak, and that’s the point. She’s not selling a grand ideological project; she’s framing mobility as pocketbook and mental-health policy. Time is money, stress is quality of life, and travel is the shared chokepoint where residents, commuters, and businesses all feel the same friction. By casting the problem as “unnecessary,” Bean implies there are obvious, achievable fixes being delayed by inertia, underinvestment, or mismanagement - an indictment without naming a villain.

The plural “we” does heavy lifting. It recruits listeners into a collective identity (a community that “we’ve built”) while also distributing responsibility and softening partisan edges. It’s an argument for infrastructure and planning that avoids culture-war triggers: no scolding about cars, no technocratic sermon about zoning. Just a moral claim dressed as common sense: pride in a place shouldn’t require accepting preventable waste as the cost of living there.

In context, it reads like a pitch for transit improvements, smarter road design, or regional coordination - policy as relief, not punishment.