It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.

I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.

Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago lol

It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.

Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?

We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.

> a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.

Don't forget the short-sighted NIMBYism.

I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.

Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.

And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.

Changes are stymied by bureaucracy put in place due to fear of litigation. The primary reason that things are studied, studied again, given community input, and checked for environmental impact is that if a city or municipality gets sued due to a road change, the onus is on them to demonstrate that they didn't create an unsafe condition. For example in cases where cars crash and are liable for property damage, car owners try to sue the city to claim that the area was unsafe. Pointing to a massive paper trail like this removes liability from a set of city or municipal concerns.

Nah, that's just the bullshit they tell you.

A municipal or state government will not be held liable for the consequences of shitty infrastructure unless there's like 9/11 levels of "the system was blinking red and you ignored it" and even then it's coin toss at best. Like maybe if they kill a ton of people there might be a lawsuit that sticks that's sooooo unlikely for the scope of the kind of thing we're talking about here.

The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.

> Nah, that's just the bullshit they tell you.

I mean, this is the "bullshit" that our DOT told us when talking about guerilla urbanism at a real city meeting. I agree that it's frustrating, but it is what we were told. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)

> The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.

Do you have any real experience in city or local government?

>. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city government has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)

You ask them how much money they'd pay out to lawsuits, how much money they were paying out before adopting those policies. You ask them how much these policies cost (I bet they haven't even calculated it because they'd rather not have that number exist). Etc. Etc You make them spell out the math for you.

>And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)

Suing the .gov is often the only way to get them to shape up and do the thing they should have in the first place. Getting sued doesn't mean much. It's all about the results.

The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.

>Do you have any real experience in city or local government?

Worse, state. MIC prior to that.

> The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.

I mean I 100% agree with this by the way. We tried to tell the DOT to look at its own stats. The one lawsuit they actually paid out in was from street design before the formation of the DOT itself and the fact that they fell behind on the paving schedule. If you actually amortize the payout over 30 years (I think the city has had one of these roughly every 30 years) it ends up being some minuscule part of the budget. But they still shut us down.

In my region of the world this exists and every year residents can vote for projects in their immediate vicinity.

I use a 5km stretch of bike lane daily going to work and back which was built this way. It runs along a railway line, so while it was navigable previously, off-season (so now) it would be covered in mud.

The initiative was spearheaded by just one lady who had an idea and a concrete proposal how to implement it.