Flutterby™! : Bottom-up policy

Yesterday evening, Charles "Chuck" Marohn of StrongTowns.org teleconferenced in to the Petaluma Urban Chat meeting to give a variation of his "curbside chat" talk and do a short Q&A. As a part of that, he had pictures from a Memphis neighborhood that did guerilla street markings: For a few hundred bucks in paint they completely revitalized the street, storefronts went from vacant to becoming premium property, they got pedestrian and bicyclist traffic, bottom-up change worked well.

In that vein, I was browsing this MeFi entry on clearing bike paths in the Netherlands and ran across: How some committed cyclists paved the way for Calgary's pathway snow clearing: apparently a couple of Calgary cyclists started clearing a few bike paths on their own, and then after doing this for several years, one day Calgary got 18" of wet heavy snow, and...

But something happened that day. All the runners and cyclists who had grown accustomed to a cleared pathway started complaining to City Hall. Why haven’t you cleared the pathway yet, they asked. Get out and do your jobs, they demanded. The trouble was, the city never cleared that pathway. It was Kerr and Gruttz and those volunteers. But after five years, Calgarians had come to expect it, and the assumed it was city workers doing the job.

Both an inspirational tale (for us active citizens) and a cautionary one (for city engineers and managers).