The Seven
Habits of Highly Effective BPACs
(Bicycle/Pedestrian
Action Committees)
Want to start
your own BPAC?
by
Dwight Kingsbury
Tallahassee, Florida
Disclaimer: Author has no experience with how effective committees are
supposed to work. The committee MOO I'm most familiar with is the "Express
yourself" school of group individualized learning.
But,
as Plato imagined an ideal republic and Machiavelli described an ideal
prince, I have developed a concept about how the ideal bike/ped committee
should work.
1.
Someone on the committee—the chairman, or an obsessive-compulsive
secretary-type (unnecessary, if chairman is O-C)—needs to save every
document the committee has received in the past 3 years, keeping them in a
superbly organized file, like the foot-high stack of loose papers on my
bookshelf.
Think
you'll remember that explanation of why STP funds can't be spent on local
access roads you got in August 1998? Or the projected budget for the Capitol
Boulevard median island chariot course retrofit? No you won't.
Counting on the coordinator to keep this info? That would violate principle
number
2. Be
cooperative, but independent. Good coordinators and planners are overworked
and already have too many demands on their time. To make sure your own pet
goals are being remembered and achieved, your committee has to keep track.
Let the Inquisition, like Inspector Javert.
3.
Develop options for the committee to consider before the
committee meets. Full committee meetings are for choosing options, not for
developing them (risk of rapid entropic degradation). Establish
subcommittees, like the Hillsborough BPACs.
You
should render non-participating subcommittee members completely
impotent—actually, this will happen anyway. Or make every other monthly
meeting a subcommittee meeting of the whole, as the Broward BAC does.
4.
Develop a network of staff, elected officials, professionals, other
advocates with whom you can confer. This facilitates evaluation of what is
potentially achievable. As a planner once advised me, "Don't waste your
political capital." This leads to rule
5.
Don't waste your political capital. Choose your battles wisely, and present
well-researched resolutions and recommendations (unless they are
non-controversial, like asking the mayor to declare Bike-to-Eat Day).
6.
Staff or other committees should do work that is related but for which the
BPAC does not have the time, ability, or temperament. Bike/ped and greenway
planning and signalization improvements are best left to staff and
consultants, subject to BPAC review and input on goals and criteria.
The
Gainesville MPO has a "Design Team" of staff and professionals that reviews
projects on request to consider landscaping, special treatments, and other
amenities. The Hillsborough MPO has a citizen's Livable Transportation
Committee which reviews projects for similar considerations.
7.
But don't limit yourself. Stick your nose into everything, since ultimately,
everything in the universe is related to bike/ped design (wasn't it Spinoza
who said this?). Having achieved one goal, advance on next (Napoleon). But
let others take credit (sign on Ronald Reagan's desk). When people see the
results of the committee's efforts, they will assume they were mandated by
local policies and design standards—as they should be—and not the hard won
achievements of the feverish Dostoyoveskian characters on your committee.
If, after reading this, you think a BPAC will work in your
community, contact FBA. If you think the chemistry is right, we'll even put
on a workshop for you and other potential committee members. |
