What we are doing
Urban Ecology helped to organize a Community Task Force to be a strong advocate to follow, inform and add value to the MTA’s “Eastern Neighborhoods Transportation Implementation Planning Study” project. The Task Force will ensure there is a community voice and perspective as an important component of this transportation planning process.
Urban Ecology is separately resourced to serve as a “Community Facilitator” independent of, but in collaboration with, the MTA’s technical consulting team. During the course of our work with the community throughout the city’s EN TRIPS process, we will be sending regular briefings to the Community Task Force, as well as posting updates on this website. Urban Ecology will also be closely tracking the EN TRIPS process inside the city bureaucracy, making sure the community voice is heard and maintaining a direct pipeline to communicate information back to the community. With MTA’s process about to ramp up, we wanted to post this update about what’s happened so far, and what we can look forward to working on together in the coming months.
What’s Happened So Far
The Community Task Force Kick Off Meeting was held in February to officially form the group. We are still encouraging more people to join the task force, to get broad representation from all of the neighborhoods affected by EN TRIPS. We have conducted interviews with the current members of the Community Task Force to hear their initial thoughts, goals, and priorities for the city’s EN TRIPS process and outcomes. We plan to summarize what came out of these interviews for you at the next task force meeting.
Since that kick off meeting we have been coordinating with MTA staff to get an accurate idea of what their proposed process will look like. We have uploaded their anticipated EN TRIPS schedule to the document sharing page on our project website for community access. MTA has contracted with the consultant firm Nelson\Nygaard to perform the workload of the EN TRIPS project. Nelson\Nygaard specializes in transportation planning with an emphasis on alternative transportation. Their technical team includes several subconsultants—Fehr and Peers (engineering), Community Design + Architecture (streetscape design), Turnstone Consulting (environmental analysis). The contract scope for the MTA’s technical consultants is also uploaded to the document sharing page of the project website.
We have been regularly interfacing with MTA, the Transportation Authority and Planning Department staff to get a clear understanding of their current work on EN TRIPS so that we can convey this information to you and the public at large. A key role for our Urban Ecology team working on behalf on the Community Task Force and the broader Eastern Neighborhoods communities is to aim to stay ahead of MTA and Planning staff decisions, so that we may help shape the EN TRIPS process using the perspective we bring from engaging with the community.
What to Expect Next
The week of July 6th we hope to have the next Community Task Force meeting with the city’s study process having freshly kicked off by that point. We will announce the date after the Community Task Force picks one. At that next task force meeting we intend to gather your early input in anticipation of the first “Issues and Opportunities” step of MTA’s plan. This will help to establish the range of transportation improvements in the Eastern Neighborhoods that will be vetted through the EN TRIPS study process.
Urban Ecology has also restructured its project staffing for EN TRIPS by adding Peter Cohen to our team. He brings significant knowledge of the Eastern Neighborhoods planning context and experience navigating public agency processes. Peter will be the lead for much of our project work.
What you can do now
We can now begin this process in earnest. On our EN TRIPS project community website we have developed a mapping tool that will allows you to pin up potential projects, problem spots, opportunity sites that you’d like to share or discuss with others. Click the ‘new’ button on the right side to add an ‘Issue’ or ‘Opportunity.’ These ideas will in turn be included as more input to MTA for vetting through the technical study process. We will do a full tutorial on how to use this mapping tool at the next Community Task Force meeting, but feel free to begin using it now if you’d like.
Thank you again for taking part in this process to help ensure the city agencies hear the wishes and needs of the Eastern Neighborhoods communities as transportation improvements are planned for your neighborhoods.
Feel free to contact our Urban Ecology team at any time – we are here to help this process move smoothly in any way we can. Peter Cohen (pcohen_sf at yahoo.com; 415-722-0617); Andrew Hyder (andrew at urbanecology.org; 415-617-0158).