First off the bat, I do have to say that going into it, I had really low expectations for the We Ride Transit campaign that I blogged about last week. I’ve just heard one too many stories from people who’ve had personal and organizational run-ins with the Canadian Federation of Students, and any organization worth being involved in wouldn’t have left this bad a taste in the mouth of so many people if there wasn’t something to all the criticisms. (Many of those ‘bad tastes’ also involve lawsuits and inaccurate financial statements, by the way.)
That said, I do have to say that I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon. The We Ride Transit campaign is certainly ambitious and had me raising my eyebrows at certain points. The consultation they held at SFU is only one of many in a series that they are going to be holding at several campuses across the province (I’m assuming they’re all CFS schools, which is why there were none on the schedule distributed today at UBC). The next one will be at SFU Surrey on November 22nd from 1 to 4pm – the location details will be posted to their site when available, likely, and there are a couple more happening through December into January. They distributed a discussion guide, which was intended to set the scene for some of the discussion – I didn’t read it over too closely, as I was listening to some of the clusters of conversation nearby that were already starting to form at the mere thought of the transit topic, so ripe it is as a source of common frustration here at SFU. That’s also about the time my liveblogging to twitter started. (As I explained on Twitter, it would have been great to do this on Jaiku, except that the cost of liveblogging to Jaiku probably would have paid for a decent lunch, since international texts are 40 cents each. Again, my apologies for not being able to link to all of them in one fell swoop.)
Our hosts informed us that Jim Green, the keynote, had to cancel. We then proceeded into about 45 minutes of “consultations,” then an hour of “deliberative dialogue.” As I mentioned before, a staple of the We Ride campaign in both their marketing (like stickers on the back of washroom doors – glad they sympathize with the janitors who remove that stuff all the time in favor of guerilla eyeballs), their website, and their event was the emphasis on stories. As I unfortunately and cynically predicted at the end of my last post, the call for stories was mostly trotting out tales of late-night strandings by night buses, being passed by buses, and difficulties with getting to jobs and classes on time as a result of poor transit service, or poorer transportation design and planning. I ended up being one of the less than five people who spoke of positive experiences with transit – and indeed, the facillitator was one of the others, if not the only other one.
I sympathize. I’ll spare you all the sob story – but in the many blocks of 30 minutes that I had to think about it, I’ve come to realize that transit is a perplexing beast precisely because as individuals, we personally bear the brunt of the consequences for what is apparent to us to be a failure of a system, that we have put our faith in – often times because we have no other choice, but sometimes because we choose to for the sake of the environment, or our mental health in order to not drive, or our families so that we don’t have to spend hard-earned money on gasoline. The temptation to blame myself for transit’s problems was pretty strong. For one of the speakers at today’s consultation (who also claimed to have worked at Winnipeg’s transit system), he pulled no punches in saying that overcrowding was due to laziness on the part of students not trying to make buses during off-peak times, and that calls for more transit for students were short-sighted for the fact that they would divert service from other areas where it is desperately needed.
Aside from the fact that I think his analysis is rather crude and insensitive, I think (and I stated as such) that events focusing on “stories” like this encourage ourselves to feel victimized as users, rather than empowered as part owners and creative individuals who can constructively contribute to improving transit. This was a room full of university students – yet the driving force behind this event was not for us to turn the fruit of our collective learning, acquired expertise, or unique perspective between worlds into something tangibly applicable. Instead, we were asked to sign essentially a petition (the call), to submit our stories in creative ways, and to participate in a numbers game, because as students, “our strength is in numbers,” it was said. I’m not inspired by that, but maybe I’m picky.
I digress. The submissions from all of the We Ride Transit consultations, we were told, will be compiled into a report that will be submitted to the Province of British Columbia. (They were also recorded and will be available by request to SFU students. I feel like asking for a copy of my statement.) Next, we had a facillitator, Marco DeLuca, lead us through the deliberative dialogue.
While the process of that was interesting, despite the facillitators valiant efforts, I personally didn’t find it very valuable for a couple reasons. Firstly, there was a lot of talk about how this “wasn’t the way a dialogue is usually supposed to be,” since no one from TransLink was present at today’s consultation, and it was mostly students, with a few other interested individuals (like SPEC’s Richard Campbell). This really got it off on the wrong foot for me – one of the rules of open space, after all, is that everyone who shows up was meant to be there. I don’t want to spend time fretting about who isn’t, or why that degrades the quality or impact of the dialogue. Secondly, transit is an expansive topic – it goes into urban planning, land use and resource management, patterns of work, visions of the good life…while the three approaches that were used to guide the dialogue were interesting to consider, I didn’t feel that we were really instructed all that well one what the intent of the exercise was, or how to contrast the differences between the approaches. Halfway through discussion of the second approach, we more or less degenerated back into making points about random topics.
Hosting dialogues is incredibly difficult – my experience with the Semester in Dialogue brought me up close and personal with that, so I’m by no means slagging Marco (though as I twittered, there was something about his method of address that really just didn’t click with me. But I’m from a different background, perhaps others really connected with it), who did a great job with what he was given, such as way more time than he expected, and students who may not have been accustomed to the sort of respectful listening and responding that dialogues require. I think the manner of the consultation really set the tone for the rest of the dialogue. I didn’t feel empowered by that experience of dialogue, or that I walked away with anything other than more 145 bus horror stories. This wasn’t about us articulating or further developing solutions – though some, like HOV-only arterials, light-rail and progressive taxes, were mentioned. It will be interesting to see how the campaign fares, and I wish them the best.
It’s certainly generating even more food for thought for me, as we start to pull the finer details on TransitCamp together. More rubbing of chin and staring into space is required.
