I chatted briefly with the Active Transportation Coordinator. When pressed lightly about the thinking behind the survey he attempted to change the subject to the validity of the decision to cancel the bridge. Struck with the sudden fear that I might accidentally cause The Great Footbridge Survey Scandal I quickly bailed out of the conversation.
I don't think I really understand the point of public consultation. You hold a meeting and the people who come to the meeting line up and say stuff. Some of the people who say stuff do not have to stand in line and have access to a projector. Sometimes the people talking will express an opinion on the issue that caused the meeting. Often times people will talk about unrelated things. Sometimes there are pieces of paper distributed. Sometimes you are expected to write stuff on the distributed paper. Some of the people there are there simply to be seen to be there (usually local politicians).
Public consultation is all the rage these days. In general the results of these things are used a bit like the conclusions of consultants. If the result matches the politically determined conclusion it is used as support of that conclusion. Otherwise it is ignored. That is OK as far as it goes. The problem is that these things are touted as a way for non-politicians to participate in the process for the small cost of an evening. The actual participation is at at level of the employee who submits an idea to the suggestion box only to have that suggestion dumped in the trash at the end of the month. In this way I think that the participants in public consultation meetings are being deliberately misled. Rather than helping the process such meetings are harmful in that they tend to distract people from participating in a more effective and difficult political process. A thoughtful letter to a city councillor is a much better use of a citizens time then sitting around listening to people go on about random stuff.
If politicians really want to make it easy for citizens to participate in low level decisions there are better ways to do so. They could just hold a poll. Give everyone enumerated in the civic election a long random number. Post the arguments for and against something on a website somewhere. Let people insult each other on a forum for a while and if any actual new arguments arise from the chaos post them too. Post this all various places offline and see if any offline people can add to the arguments. People would vote by quoting their numbers either on-line or in the form of a letter. Votes with duplicate numbers would be quietly discarded unless there were an excessive number of them. If there were multiple options then the voters would rank them and an appropriate form of preferential voting would be used. If it was felt that such a system would lead to some sort of tyranny of the majority at the expense of local interests voting could be restricted to a particular area or the value of votes could be geographically weighted. Raw data would be made public as well as any complaints of vote buying and/or other coercion.
I feel that the system described in the previous paragraph would be a lot better than holding public meetings. As a bonus the professional politicians would not have to waste their evenings sitting in an uncomfortable chair. The results of such polls could still be ignored if required. The results would be of higher quality than a bunch of rambling speeches.
In the end the process with repect to the footbridge sort of worked. I am just not sure exactly what that process was. The dangerous metal posts on the existing bridge were removed. One day they were just gone. I like to think that some low level civic employee with access to an angle grinder heard about the controversy and just decided to deal with the issue. More romantically; a rouge individual somewhere out there in the dark who believes in direct action against civic infrastructure for the greater good. Perhaps we need such a hero...
Speaking of direct action... Most of these stimulus projects are funded by three levels of government. The tradition is to identify tax money going to any generally popular and non-controversial project by erecting a sign. As a result each of these projects ends up with 3 signs. There are many small projects so the city now has a lot of these signs everywhere. Sort of the most boring Burma-Shave campaign imaginable. I was delighted to see that someone has given the now irrelevant signs at the footbridge site purpose with the creation of some textual art. Sometimes anarchy makes the world a better place.
posted at: 13:09 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry