After the Crash Analysis Studio: 6 Next Steps for Creating Safe Streets
You’ve just completed a Crash Analysis Studio and you have a report in hand. Or you found the "Beyond Blame" report compelling and informative, and you want to share it with your community. Now what?
The next step as a strong citizen is to share these reports broadly within your community, and the most important and effective way to do this is through your local municipality. These elected bodies are extremely orderly systems with many opportunities to engage in this system.
Let me pull back the veil of mystery of your local bureaucracy and share several things you can do as a citizen to introduce a conversion on safe and productive streets that goes beyond blame.
1. Share a Public Comment at a Council Meeting
Attend your city or county council meeting and sign up for public comment. Public comment will be on the agenda and it is the time when residents can share comments on items that may not be on the agenda. The process to speak varies from just showing up to registering in advance.
The time allotted to each speaker will vary, but generally, you will have two or three minutes to speak. Take this opportunity to share how much you like your community and that you would like to help make the streets in your community safer. From there, share your report and point out key findings.
Public speaking is not everyone’s strength, so it is okay to feel nervous. I have found that, if you speak about what you love about your community, how you have conducted a Crash Analysis Studio or why it is meaningful to you, you will come across as confident and authentic.
Be sure to have a hard copy of the report with you and inform the council that you will be leaving the copy behind for their review. Sharing a public comment and leaving the report creates a permanent public record in the meeting minutes. Your message will also be amplified if the public meeting is broadcasted on the internet or through local access TV. I think you will be surprised to learn that you are not the only one concerned about safer streets.
If you live in a city, repeat this process at the county commission, metropolitan planning organization (MPO) and any other applicable municipal boards.
2. Ask To Have the Report Put on Your Council Agenda
Our local governments are required to post and publish agenda packets for every meeting. The packets are full of information and are intended to guide the meeting discussion. Either your mayor or clerk is responsible for preparing the agenda for the meeting. It does not hurt to ask if the report can be added to the agenda for discussion.
Once on the agenda, you may be asked to present the report. If this opportunity emerges, I recommend keeping it simple and brief. Do all the things I just shared for public comment.
The difference between a public comment and an agenda item is that the council can comment or take action on an agenda item. The city council may want to know more about this approach or may direct staff to learn more about it. Through this process, you begin to open a conversation about moving beyond blame in your community.
3. Mail the Report to City Hall
The agenda is where municipalities compile all of their communications so they can be reviewed by elected officials. The municipal clerk or manager will include things like various public announcements, letters received from residents, and invitations or notices to be memorialized within the agenda package.
Memorializing all of these communications provides the opportunity for your elected officials or municipal staff to reference them or provide comments on the agenda. Many times you’ll see these prior to a holiday or special event. For example, organizations like Toys for Tots or the local food bank may announce collection locations within the city. Many times, elected officials will point out that they received a notice and may talk for a minute or two about why they thought it was important to bring it to the attention of the community.
4. Submit the Report as a Written Public Comment
All of our cities are in a perpetual state of long-range, vision or master planning. Each of these planning processes includes a lot of public engagement where citizens are asked what they think. The typical responses are comments at a meeting or dots on a map. These public engagements also include the opportunity to submit written public comments.
Written public comments can be mailed, emailed or provided in person. You can find out where to submit these comments either through the public notice or by contacting city hall.
Once collected, written public comments are then reviewed. The consultants undertaking public engagement processes are required to review, organize and, if necessary, respond to all of the public comments. Many times, these consultants will include all previously prepared reports or studies that relate to the scope of the plan. I have also found through my own experience that consultants never seem to overlook a good idea.
Through the process of public comment, you can increase the awareness and exposure of the Crash Analysis Studio. This approach may be new to the consultant team that is being asked to address a struggle in your community, and they can apply this approach locally. The consultant team might also include the recommendations of the Studio in the master plan they are working on.
This is something I did regularly when I was in local government. I would submit my city’s adopted plans, proposed developments and vision documents as public comments when regional plans were being developed. This previous work informed the new work and moved a vision closer toward implementation.
5. Engage Appointed Boards and Steering Committees
Larger cities that are more complicated may appoint boards and steering committees to review and provide recommendations to your city council. These appointed boards may be less formal than your city council, but they must follow similar record retention policies.
I would recommend sharing these plans with all of the boards and steering committees related to the contributing factors of a crash. For example, if your Crash Analysis Studio occurred adjacent to a park or the victim of that Studio was walking to or from a park, I would share the report with your parks and recreation board or steering committee. The connection is that a contributing factor was the park. By sharing the report with a broader audience, you can help the board and committee members learn that they are not isolated in the work they do. They may also be able to provide additional recommendations, making the call for action louder. These boards and committees may also have access to additional local resources to address the contributing factors or implement the recommendations from your report.
6. Share With Unlikely Partners Like Your Local School Board
Throughout North America, the responsibility for safe streets seems to be ever expanding. This is due to our current approach where we blame the driver or walker. In many places, we are asking our school districts to make the streets safer for students. This is an odd fit, but a result of focusing on blame and not focusing on contributing factors.
Sharing a Crash Analysis Studio report at your school board meeting is very similar to public comment at your council meeting. You have a few minutes to speak where you briefly share the report, and you leave a printed copy of the report behind.
The purpose of sharing this report with the school board is to increase awareness and help the community understand where to focus action. This provides more tools for the school board to advocate for action to be taken beyond assigning blame.
The Ultimate Goal
The ultimate goal of creating the Crash Analysis Studio approach is for every community across North America to adopt it. This is a shift in how we talk about crashes, and it will take many voices advocating for change to succeed. Your public comment becomes part of a permanent record in some communities, which means that these documents will be uploaded and searchable in a public database. Through many two- or three-minute presentations we can raise awareness to achieve this goal.
One of the many lessons I have learned from conducting Crash Analysis Studios is that people were far more connected than they realized. For each of the Studios we helped conduct, we received an outpouring of support from the community. We found that our local experts were not alone with their concerns or recommendations. Through sharing these reports in multiple places in the public realm, we found that coalitions began to emerge that supported a new way of thinking about crashes and shifted the conversation beyond blame.
Do you want more guidance in making your streets safer? Registration for the Accelerator winter session is open now. Attendees will get personalized coaching from Strong Towns experts with insights from the book “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town.”
A maximum of 30 people will be accepted, so sign up now!
Edward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.