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Weighing the value of transport expenditures
Commissioner,
Your focus on listening to the customer, citizens and taxpayers, in managing priorities of the departments is a breath of fresh air. In our capitalist system, the best businesses do the same. Thanks.
The City and the transportation department are correct to emphasize pedestrian safety. As the population ages, we will all tend toward pedestrians, of course our children often walk to school and activities. A single pedestrian accident generates huge medical expenses, to say nothing of lost productivity, much more than the capital costs to help prevent it. The challenge for the individual is to realize that what they want at home, a safe street to walk upon, is exactly what the residents of the neighborhoods we commute through want.
Friends in NE live on an unimproved street. They don't want it improved! They are reclaiming it with plantings. Perhaps transportation could begin a facilitation program documenting and publicising creative improvements to unimproved streets and also offering the residents a wholesale contract for installing gravel through the City and its contractors. Ditto for wholesale nursery contracts. Contact me if you need the address.
It would be easy and cost effective for the City to launch an unimproved street creative improvement program with primarily volunteer labor through PSU's planning program or a variety of civic groups.