Be unafraid to take risks, learn
One of the secrets of WalMart is not big locations, blue vests or even everyday low pricing. It was founder Sam Walton’s willingness to experiment with things, measure the results and then decide to go with what was more profitable.
Even today, that’s the reason why things are always being moved around the store. Do gloves sell better here, or did they do better over there? Such things are measured, studied and then changed to make each store more profitable.
Can we conduct experiments like that in a city? Conventional wisdom says that we can’t. Once infrastructure is done, it is there for a hundred years and it’s hard to fix when you get it wrong. We tend to put it in and leave it in, even if it was a big mistake.
Some cities take a different approach. Janette Sadik-Khan was New York’s traffic commissioner from 2007 to 2013. She recently spoke in Auckland, New Zealand, about some of the hundreds of transportation pilot projects New York City tried during her term.
The Bloomberg administration had an incredible vision to transform New York into the world’s premiere city. To do that, the city adopted some of the best practices and ideas from around the world. It had clear short-term and long-term goals on issues such as traffic congestion, multimodal transportation, and even on ways to let New Yorkers get around better in tourist-congested areas.
With firm goals in place, it took steps to attain them. Underused streets had bus lanes added. Studies showed the city that a quarter of bus delays was caused by people fumbling for change. So New York added pre-payment stations that speeded up transit. Faster bus service meant more users, and fewer cars on the streets. Even if you don’t use public transit, the fact that others do lessens congestion for all and makes for a faster commute.
New York offered up a program so neighbourhoods could apply for and install mini-plazas, giving them a place where people could gather and build stronger community ties. There was also a program to reinvent and fix sidewalks by adding benches so they would also be neighbourhood gathering places.
Those results were studied and then New York did what any great city does. It built on what works and tried something new if it failed.
There are many failed projects in Saskatoon that are kept on life support. The 25th Street bike corridor is perhaps the most famous. It was created with the hope that people would commute from Confederation to downtown. It was wide enough to squeeze in a bike sharrow and quiet enough not to disturb motorists.
Of course, like many west-side residential streets, 25th Street is a mess, and the change in signage has created a high-speed car corridor. The sharrows on the street have worn off, and the only thing that keeps the speed down is the poor condition of the road.
Instead of trying to fix it, improve it or even admit that the corridor is a failure, it is just left to die by neglect. The worst thing is that because we didn’t study it, the city hasn’t learned from the experiment.
So why aren’t we more innovative and more open to change in Saskatoon? Many suggest it is a lack of leadership.
Bike lanes work in other cities because their mayor and council members took ownership. In Saskatoon it was Saskatoon Cycles trying to push for bike lanes. In fact, other than the north commuter bridge, I haven’t seen a single bold initiative pursued by the current city council. It seems much more comfortable discussing consultants’ proposals for the future than in making life better for Saskatoon residents today.
Of course this matters, because while the commuter bridge may be here in 2017, we are stuck in traffic now. Bike lanes may or may not be happening in 2015, but people have to get to work downtown today.
Other cities have come up with some amazing ideas to make things work more effectively. Why aren’t we evaluating to see which of those ideas work here? Instead of waiting for other levels of government to pay for our big fix, we could be trying out all sorts of alternatives to make Saskatoon a better place to live.
The difference between Saskatoon and cities such as Calgary, Vancouver and even New York is not our smaller size or climate, but the lack of leadership to embrace risk and try new things. Instead of being afraid of change, let’s take the risk that some of the ideas other cities have tried could make ours a better city.