Inclusive Transportation
Veronica Davis
Inclusive Transportation is a vision for change and a new era of transportation planning. Veronica Davis explains why centering people in transportation decisions requires a great shift in how transportation planners and engineers are trained, how they communicate, the kind of data they collect, and how they work as professional teams. She examines what “equity” means for a transportation project, which is central to changing how we approach and solve problems to create something safer, better, and more useful for all people.
Highlights
There are plenty of “get out and move” campaigns, but how does one get out and move when there are no sidewalks or paths, no trees to provide shade, and no places to sit when one gets tired?
One thing that gets muddled as people in the United States attempt to adopt Vision Zero is conflation of the total number of crashes with the total number of crashes that lead to deaths and serious injuries. Vision Zero does not demand perfect records, and it recognizes that crashes will occur because we are human. Instead, it argues that the focus should be on deaths and serious injuries.
The disconnect is compounded because project managers often do not understand engagement, or it is not something that is a strength for them. Very few project managers have both strength in the technical components and ideas for how to engage the public. A public engagement lead who is not included in technical meetings is left to rely on the project manager to communicate guidance from the client in the public engagement process. We have all played “telephone” and understand how this puts clear communication at risk.
The government entity did not listen to the community in the past, so every time it shows up for new community feedback, the community gets upset and brings up the issue from the past. The engineers or planners do not want to be yelled at by the public, so they create a process to minimize public engagement or concoct a convoluted faux-engagement process really designed to avoid getting yelled at. Then the community gets upset and sends emails or posts comments on the internet, which leads to engineers and planners being scared of the community. Rinse and repeat.
... none of us know what is going to happen in the future. Rather than project from what we can see today, we should be projecting from a vision of what we want life to be in the future. Projections based on the past are why we end up with wide roads.
No items found.