Misplaced trust
I’ve written long and hard on why it is the designer’s/planner’s role to make public process informative, factual, acceptable, and transparent to the public. But what is the responsibility of the public to get the facts? For a good example of how things should NOT work, here’s the story of what’s happened in my own neighborhood over the past few months.
The neighborhood association officials are not elected by the neighborhood. They appoint their own successors. You can see there is already a problem. Because we are in-town, there are many development pressures surrounding the neighborhood. A few years ago, the association went after a few of the developers, and with some matching grants has proceeded to devise a $4 million plan for “pedestrian and traffic calming.”
I wrote about our ongoing neighborhood brawl in a recent post at Planetizen, but here’s a quick refresher: We’re talking about a lovely old area, adjacent to an Olmsted-designed park, with wide sweeping streets, scenic vistas, and plenty of topography. The “traffic calming” plan will tighten all the streets into one lane, limit parking, and install new speed bumps and larger traffic islands, which they affectionately call “amoebouts.” They did not hire a traffic engineer to design the new streets but relied instead on a variety of donated designs from neighbors.
Association officials had what they thought was a fine idea, found the money to pay for it—or at least a portion of it—-and have become fiercely determined to make it happen. Several neighbors, most of whom are involved in public infrastructure projects for a living (yes, I am one of them), think it’s an extraordinarily bad idea. It is simply too much for no good reason, an overzealous attempt to fix something that does not need fixing. No accidents, no issues, just money burning a hole in the neighborhood association’s pocket.
The association leadership decided that if 75% of property owners approved this plan, the city council would have to cave in and give approval to reconstruct the streets. So the association held public meetings, where the leadership presented only their rosy picture of the traffic plan. They did not disclose such information as how much infrastructure (water, sewer, etc.) will need to be replaced or how $4 million will ever be enough to rebuild streets and construct 15 traffic islands. The neighborhood web site tells only their side of the story. If you spoke against the plan, you were simply shouted down or booed off the floor.
Block captains went door to door to get neighbors to sign a petition in favor of the plan, telling residents it is for “traffic calming,” and wouldn’t it be nice to have safe streets and less traffic? Things got a little ugly. Anyone against the plan was branded as deviant and invited to move out of the neighborhood. The association even went so far as to print a map in the neighborhood newsletter, identifying yes or no votes keyed to each property—thus providing a “helpful” guide for future snubs.
The city council, ever mindful of how voters are feeling, has presented an ordinance that abdicates any city responsibility for public safety and welfare on these public streets, putting it squarely on the backs of the neighborhood association.
So the ordinance is on the table. The association leadership thinks it has won the battle and will get the “traffic calming” they want. My neighbors have entrusted the property values of their historic neighborhood to the association leadership, which has no experience building even one foot of infrastructure. The engineering plans and professional cost estimates have not yet begun. The 75% of neighbors who have voted in favor of the plan have not asked for more information regarding construction costs or design. They seem content in the knowledge that they signed petitions and will have calm traffic.
They heard only one side of the story. While several people, including me, have tried to get the unpleasant facts out, our neighbors just did not care to take the time to know the details. What will happen when the real cost for the design is made public, when neighbors begin to understand that the response time for fire and emergency vehicles to their homes will be slowed, and when the streets start getting torn up?
I have to wonder, if the city or some other entity had come into our neighborhood and proposed to tear up our streets for traffic calming, wouldn’t residents have been more skeptical and questioning?
I’ve said that building trust is important in public consensus. But sometimes trust can be misplaced. The neighborhood association has relied on residents’ unquestioning trust in advancing this unsound plan.