| Abstract |
What happens when you hear from a community that has many community members that want change, and then the City implements the change? Ah of course, you hear from the other many community members that never wanted change in the first place. The City’s Street Lab program was designed to trial traffic calming in neighbourhoods, and typically uses standard measures like curb extensions and speed humps. However, when the Ritchie neighbourhood was selected for a Street Lab, City administration saw an opportunity to address longer standing issues that residents have frequently brought up in the past, such as a missing sidewalk and a substandard bike route. The final project included the standard measures as well as multiple uncommon measures including diverters, centre medians at an all-way stop, and an adaptive sidewalk. What ensued is a tale of two neighbourhoods, with some residents pushing for change during public engagement when the project first started, while others brought forward unintended impacts and new challenges after implementation. Faced with significant public blowback, it required examining the project from a technical and public perspective to admit where we were wrong, lean on each other to manage workload, get help from staff in other areas, and make changes to the project and future processes. Ultimately, the lessons learned through failure allowed us to get things right, and keep many of the components that were working.
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