After three years of neighbors lobbying the city, workers installed speed bumps on Northeast Wistaria Drive in October. Whether it’s a traffic issue, cell towers or some other neighborhood problem, every situation is unique. But here are several things that might have helped us and could be used to advance other neighborhood issues:
- Enlist neighbors. One of the first things we did three years ago was hold a meeting in my living room with a city representative. About 10 of my neighbors showed up, each with a horror story, reinforcing for the city that I wasn’t a lone crank.
- Get involved with the neighborhood association. About the same time, I went to a meeting of the Beaumont-Wilshire Neighborhood Association. Under the leadership of Al Ellis, the association is always looking to advance issues important to the neighborhood, and the board embraced our concerns. Every time Ellis, the association president, showed up at a meeting with the city, it added to the neighborhood’s credibility.
- Don’t count on politicians. Under the city of Portland’s commission form of government, each city bureau answers to a different commissioner. For transportation, the commissioner happened to be Mayor Sam Adams. I went to testify before the council. After my three minutes, Adams wasn’t interested. The rest of the commissioners deferred to Adams and remained mute, including Nick Fish, who literally lives a stone’s throw from our street.
- Use the media. My testimony was lost on the council, but several media members at the meeting took notice. Stories followed in Neighborhood Notes and The Oregonian, which got the attention of officials in the transportation bureau.
- Find an ally in the bureaucracy. I can’t remember if I found Mark Lear or he found me. But the traffic safety manager in the transportation bureau became our biggest advocate. I’m convinced the project would not have happened without his support. The way to find sympathetic folks in city government is to talk to as many as possible and collect business cards. In our case, I attended transportation summits, invited officials to the neighborhood association and always followed up.
- Be collaborative, not confrontational. In every contact with the city, I tried to point out solutions I’d seen in other parts of the city that worked. In our case, I complimented the improvements at North Rosa Parks Way and Willamette Boulevard as worthy of imitation.
- Piggyback on other projects. I knew the city was planning bike boulevards and greenways on Alameda and Klickitat, just up the street from us. It’s much easier for the city to extend an existing project than start from scratch.
- Find the money. The city has budget problems, but there is money for certain priorities. Recently that has included stormwater projects and bike boulevards. I didn’t see how bioswales would help our traffic problem, but I pointed out to the city that our street was identified on city maps as a bike connector route. That helped make the sale for traffic calming.
- Be flexible. I went into the process thinking that curb extensions upstream or a speed readerboard might be the answers. I thought our street wasn’t eligible for speed bumps. But it was city officials who suggested the bumps as the most cost-effective long-term solution.
A lot of good fortune – and people - came together to make traffic calming a reality on our street. Future projects will be even more challenging because of the budget cuts facing the transportation bureau. But that makes it even more critical for neighbors to be smart about their strategy.