As many of you have probably heard, the Spokane Regional Transportation Council (SRTC) has been working on a Transportation Vision Project for much of 2010. This project is in place to develop a long-term (30-50 years) regional 'vision' for the future of transportation, as identified by the public, as well as an implementation plan for this vision.During the course of talking with people from all walks of life in the past year, we've heard all kinds of input, including suggestions to finish the North Spokane Corridor, provide expanded transit service, build more bicycle and pedestrian facilities and much more.
All those priorities mentioned during the Vision Project have now been integrated into an online game to help determine the makeup of an ideal transportation system, as determined by you, members of the public. SRTC invites you to play 'A Thousand Visions- A Transportation Planning Game.' Click here to go directly to it. If you choose to enter your demographic information and your email address on the last page of the game, you will go into a drawing to win a TomTom GPS unit.
And please pass the link on to anyone else you know who may be interested in helping to determine the future of transportation for Spokane. The game is expected to be online until mid-November.
That was really neat to play around with. It makes it easy to see how raising taxes or collecting fees can have a huge impact on how much money becomes available. If you could get hundreds of people to play this I'm sure some interesting solutions would come about that would benefit most people equally.
ReplyDeleteThis is a pretty cool tool. I taxed a small propety tax, hiked car registration to $45, and put $800 tax on new house construction -- and then I maxed out all the bike/sidewalk options and a couple transit options. I still have half my pot of money left. It's crazy how relatively cheap bike/sidewalk infrastructure is compared to the huge road projects.
ReplyDeleteIt really smarts to think how much effort we have to go through to squeeze such a relatively trivial amount of money for the bike stuff we've done. Gawd.
For the cost of 1/2 mile of the N/S freeway, we could have a world-class bike/walking city.
I'm hearing that a lot about how inexpensive the bike/ped facilities are in relation to roadway infrastructure. When I played, I picked my roadway projects first, just to see what would happen, then ran out of enough money to fund anymore road projects. With what was left over in my 'bank account' though, I was able to pick up the bulk of the trail projects. Thanks for playing and please tell others! It helps us determine how to spend transportation dollars in the future. -Staci
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