9.03.2006

Participating the (BiPed) Public

How do you get people to care?

That's what I'm wondering right now. At work recently, I've been looking at the MPO's Public Involvement Plan and considering some changes, and I went to a(nother) class in Raleigh called Innovations in Public Involvement. I was hoping it would tell me how you get people to care, because that is the basic goal. But I was kinda disappointed. We've also just released the Greensboro Urban Area Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Greenway Master Plan for public review and are having a walk-in open house about it on Sep. 12, so I'm thinking of ways to get people to care about that specifically.

Government is doing all kinds of stuff. A lot of people think that government isn't doing squat and that all they get for their taxes is trash pickup, but then when they're given a chance to see what government is doing, they don't have time/take time/care. The truth is, most everyone in Greensboro has a stake in this gigantic BiPed Plan, whether they're interested in
  • walking or bicycling for transportation,
  • driving on roads where bikers and walkers have their own space and aren't "in the way" as much,
  • traffic congestion,
  • ped/bike safety,
  • getting exercise on nearby off-road greenways,
  • sustainability/environmental-friendliness/improved air quality,
  • attracting the "creative class" and businesses that employ them, or
  • real estate values.
Some people will like what's in the plan, and some won't. That's the whole point: to hear the public's varied opinions. But how do you get people to care? The class I took showed us all these shiny techno-tools, such as blogs -- we spent at least an hour going over what a blog was and how to create one for your MPO. But not everyone has the Internet, and even fewer are searching for blogs on metropolitan transportation planning. So we also spent a few minutes talking about old-fashioned techniques involving going door-to-door. But that's simply not a practical approach for a region-wide planning document, since someone would have to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors.

I am hopeful that our standard approach of putting the document at various locations around the City and on the Web will work to draw folks to the open house. And I guess it's not that big a deal if nobody reviews the plan, because I have reviewed it and I thought it was OK, but it sure would be nice if a whole lot of people got involved and said Yes, we want Greensboro and its surrounding areas to improve walking and bicycling conditions. Without that citizen buy-in, it may be difficult to get to full implementation (read: actually getting things built costs more DOLLAR$) on the hundreds of miles of bike lanes, sidewalks, and greenways proposed in the plan. Nevertheless, I am optimistic that this is one plan that won't just sit on the shelf -- some of its recommendations have already been implemented, and the plan hasn't even been adopted.


Interesting sidenote: the Blogger.com spell-checker does not recognize the words blog and blogs.

posted by Peter @ 11:17 1 Comments