Your Community - Getting Projects Implemented

Achieving Buy-In | Create An Advisory Board | Community Master Planning
Getting Projects Implemented | Model Ordinances | Community Assessment

Implementng Short-Term Solutions
Short-term solutions are important for a variety of reasons. They can, for instance, solve an immediate – and critical – problem. Or they can make a bad situation tolerable while you work on a long-term solution.

For instance, one neighborhood group was working to create a pedestrian/bicycle railroad crossing in the heart of town. The current crossing was a dank, dark, and spooky underpass. As the group and the city worked on long-term (and potentially expensive) solutions, they also worked to make the existing crossing as pleasant as they could.

The Parks Department increased their efforts on cleaning the underpass and plowing snow at the entrances during winter. Public Works provided vandal-resistant lighting. Neighborhood volunteers helped by picking up litter and contacting the city when problems arose.

While none of these solutions completely eliminated the problem, they showed commitment to creating better conditions. What the short-term solutions also did was to create partnerships among agencies and citizens. These kinds of projects help to build trusting relationships between the city staff and neighborhood members. Those relationships can be indispensable when it comes to getting long-term projects implemented.

For example, when an agency builds a trail network in cooperation with local neighborhood groups, those groups may contribute to maintenance and improvements over the course of years. As a result, even the long-term solutions are enhanced by continuing incremental small-scale, short-term improvements.

Implementng Long-Term Solutions
Long-term solutions aren't for everyone, for one obvious reason: they take a long time to make happen. (Here’s more about how long projects can take.) And many people lack what it takes to stay involved for years, sometimes decades. However, long-term solutions have an important advantage over short-term solutions. They can make really major changes in how a community looks or works. In addition, such projects make a serious statement on how committed a community is to supporting things like bicycling and walking and pave the way for additional long-term (and short-term) projects.

Having long-term goals and working towards long-term solutions are important for several reasons. First, some problems can't be solved by anything but long-term solutions. If, for example, a neighborhood is isolated from the rest of the community by freeways and expressways, there's no simple, cheap solution.

Second, communities are continuously changing and long-term thinking is necessary to create good communities 20 or 30 years down the line. An area that is now a field may become a neighborhood or a shopping center. If such areas aren't developed in a bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly manner, everyone will lose. There may be no ways for bicyclists or pedestrians to get from home to a nearby shop and only dangerous high-speed routes to travel. The result: more short-distance trips using automobiles, when a quick (and healthful) walk might have accomplished the same errand.

You can get a lot accomplished by having the proper ordinances and zoning in place. Even though you might not have a lot of money available for making wholesale changes that encourage bicycling and walking, with the right ordinances in place, you can “sit back” and watch your community evolve into something better.

In the isolated neighborhood example given above, had the community been planning long-term for bicycling and walking, they would not have allowed the neighborhood to become isolated.

Long-term errors make for expensive and often unsatisfactory long-term solutions. As has often been said, it's cheaper to do things right in the first place than it is to fix things later.

Fortunately, most communities are doing some long-term projects already and, as a result, can provide the institutional tools (e.g., bond financing and access to federal funding) that can make big pedestrian and bicycle projects happen. If, for instance, you want to see a community-wide trail network, there's almost no way to make this happen without such tools.

Finally, there's no way to assure that you'll get those long-term projects done without being around. Simply having a major bicycle project included in a plan will not make it happen. Having a city council on-board won't make it happen. What can make it happen is creating a long-term presence to keep things on track.