About me
Best Practices for Youth Engagement at OakDOT - In recent years, DOTs have increasingly shifted their main focus to safety improvements for people walking and bicycling in an effort to reduce traffic injuries and deaths, slow vehicle traffic, create liveable streets, increase neighborhood connections to active transportation networks, promote healthy lifestyles, and reduce carbon emissions. Planners often prioritize safety improvements on High Injury Networks, which disproportionately run through low-income communities of color. Thus, many safety-oriented projects take place in these neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, low-income and racialized neighborhoods also tend to have suffered decades of neglect on the part of DOTs, or on the flip side, to have been over-planned and problematized without realizing positive changes. Added to this dynamic is a history of DOTs exercising eminent domain to destroy people’s homes and cultural spaces in the name of the greater good, and a current concern that new bike lanes are a harbinger of gentrification. Without careful thought, community engagement for traffic calming and active transportation projects runs the risk of re-traumatizing low-income communities by perpetuating disempowerment and neglecting residents’ needs.
Cognizant of these needs for both life-saving infrastructure improvements and life-affirming planning practices, DOTs are also increasing their focus on empowering communities through engagement. While the standard approach for decades has been project-based, in which planners solicit residents for feedback on a discreet issue, area, and time horizon, DOTs today are experimenting with relationship-based approaches, in which planners build sustainable partnerships with communities to engage on a range of issues over time. Examples of this approach include resident advisory committees, partnerships with community-based organizations (CBOs), and youth commissions. At its core, this approach is centered on equity. It seeks to develop systems of communication and accountability for planners to serve populations that are often excluded from planning processes, including low-income people of color and youth. Predictably, relationship-based engagement with these populations encounters its own set of challenges, such as limited capacity among residents and CBOs, differing knowledge systems and priorities between the public and planners, and poor cultural competency from DOTs.
In this capstone, I analyze the community engagement process for a traffic calming project in East Oakland, focusing on the challenges that planners and community members face in having a productive dialogue and building collaborative relationships in the context of a disadvantaged neighborhood. Then, I make the case for adopting a youth engagement strategy to respond to these challenges, centering the potential for such an approach to build a community of practice between planners and the public. Finally, I develop a readiness toolkit for youth engagement for safety-oriented transportation planning, to be incorporated into OakDOT’s standard operating procedure for community engagement.
