Spokane Bicycle Master Plan: Early Days

I spent another morning doing some BAB'ing. Between work, family, P2P, BAB, OTM articles, and just trying to get rides in, these "scoping" meetings with BAB and city folk are the most exciting prospect at the moment. Two Friday's ago, I wrote up a blog post about why the work we're doing right now is so exciting to me, so I won't go into the specifics here.

The purpose of this post is to explain to anyone who reads this blog and who lives in the city of Spokane that you can provide input to this process -- starting now.

One thing I've learned in the last year or so as I've gotten involved in this city/advocacy stuff is that it's all about incremental and persistent work. It's like raising a kid (I think -- I'm new to that too); you've got to keep the big picture goal in mind at all times. You want a result that is mostly good due to many small mostly good/right decisions. At the end of the day we want a city where cyclists are welcome and encouraged to ride. That will look different in specific details to different people. I don't think any plan is going to even make the majority of cyclists 100% satisfied.

The point here is that if we can take a bit of time every couple weeks or so to really focus on this stuff and make some good decisions as we do it; we should end up with a good plan. The more thoughtful folks we pull into this process to reveiw the ongoing work, the better the plan will get.

We've made some progress in the last couple weeks. To be truthful, a really dedicated city employee named Ken has made some progress. He's produced a basic outline/list that we came up with in our first meeting -- the Scoping doc. He's also pulled all of the bike-specific pieces out of the Comp Plan and put them into a single doc.

So, what can Joe Spokane Cyclist do with this?

You can review both docs. Take a look at the Scoping doc to get an understanding of our general approach. This is all draft and it's not prioritized, but it gives the reader a basic clue as to the direction of the plan. If you have questions, comments, feedback, we'll take it. For now, feel free to comment on this doc here on this blog.

More importantly: take a look at the Comp Plan Bike Excerpt doc. Read through it. If you have opinions, feedback, comments, etc on the Comp Plan language as it exists today and you want to provide that input, let me know. For this, we want to gather input (as it tends to be much more specific) in a way that is easy for us to manage. If you read through the pdf doc I have linked here and you want to submit comments, then I have a Google version of this doc created. Contact me, and I can give you "collaborator" rights to the doc and you can add comments to it. We'll see how that works.