Detail from City of Victoria 2015 Tax Insert (Source: City of Victoria)
We all know the power of images. Making a visual impact is even that much more important when trying to engage citizens in community decision-making, particularly when it comes to communicating project benefits and trade offs.
Two great examples of visually communicating recently came my way and I thought I would share them.
Example 1: City of Victoria 2015 Property Tax Insert
The first example drifted through my door in a rather unexpected way: it came with my 2015 property tax notice from the City of Victoria, BC.
Pie like Mom always made: Classic municipal property tax pie chart, this one from London, Ontario. (Source: City of London, ON)
For as far back as I can remember, the insert that accompanied my annual tax bill has looked boringly, predictably the same: 11×17″ piece of paper folded in half done in a two-tone, usually black and some other not-too-flashy hue cribbed from a 1970’s rec room colour swatch. There would typically be a photo of the mayor and his/her annual greetings on the front, text heavy list of major accomplishments in the middle and then a big shaded chart on the back reducing a year’s worth of city budget into pieces of a pie.
Yum! Municipal budget pie:
“Would you like a scoop of ice cream with your slice of ‘Engineering & Public Works’?”
— “No, thanks. Already filled up on a hefty slab of ‘Policing’ and I’m eyeing up that nice little morsel of ‘Community Planning’ for later.”
So, imagine my surprise when I opened up my 2015 property tax insert and THIS was in its centre describing how my tax dollars were going to be spent:
The City of Victoria’s 2015 Tax Insert. (Source: City of Victoria)
I felt like Dorothy after she wakes up in Oz. This piece of paper I held in my hands (see full document) presented a kaleidoscope of colour!! It was visual and it was beautiful!! It looked like the kind of fantasy city that I wanted to live in!! Hey, wait a second, I DO live there. Alright!
More importantly, this tax insert showed me not how dollars were being spent by vague city department but instead it presented tangible examples of what those dollars were being spent on and how they benefited me and others. It communicated those benefits and it did so primarily through pictures, which meant that I stood there in my kitchen and read the whole darn thing.
“Ah, yes,” I can hear the grim civic tsk-tsk-ers say, “cute pictures are all fine and dandy for you eight-second-attention-span smart-phone-addicted gen-x-ers and your younger pals–and how’d you come to own a house here, anyway?!–but this is just one more example of the dumbing down of the population. In my day, we ate our civic pie chart and we liked it. All those bland %’s gave us rouphage. And moral fortitude. And something to light the wood stove with!”
True, the tax insert is never going to have the gory detail of the City’s actual budget documents and yes, the more that citizens can take the time to delve into the detail of their cities, the better. However, in terms of inviting regular folks to consider all the vital services their city offers and the value they derive from them through their tax contribution, I think this one was pretty brilliant. Turns out the City had somewhat started along this path in 2014 but with this one I thought they knocked it out of the park, and so kudos to those at the City of Victoria who helped make it happen.
Example 2: San Francisco Potrero Avenue Benefits Document
The second example came my way thanks to a Transportation Research Board webinar I got to attend recently on Multimodality in Major Cities: Urban Success Stories.
In the series of presentations, New York City Transit’s Principal Transportation Planner Chris Pangilinan spoke about the stakeholder engagement process and materials produced during his previous work with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA, a.k.a. “Muni”). A key project highlighted by Chris was work done in tandem with the City & County of San Francisco’s Public Works department to undertake improvements to a segment of Potrero Avenue.
The changes removed parking to create an integrated offering of improvements to all sustainable transportation modes, including wider sidewalks and other pedestrian amenities, improvements to bike lane demarcation and buffering, and a bus lane. Chris had some great thoughts on the public engagement process and in particular on slide 15 of his presentation he shared an excerpt from a benefits document that summarized the evolution of the project, options that were discarded based on community feedback and some of the trade offs.
The images Chris shared struck me as a great reminder of the power of visuals when describing trade offs. Developed by SFMTA’s Dan Howard, here are some of the graphic excerpts that were focussing on parking, transit, economic development and how the changes would benefit the sizable number of people already making green travel choices on the corridor:
Excerpt from Potrero Streetscape Improvement project materials showing parking and transit trade offs. (Source: City and County of San Francisco Public Works)
Excerpt from Potrero Streetscape Improvement project materials speaking to magnitude of existing transit users in corridor and potential time benefits. (Source: City and County of San Francisco Public Works)
Excerpt from Potrero Streetscape Improvement project materials showing transit service quality trade offs. (Source: City and County of San Francisco Public Works)
I’ve chosen to focus here on the transit-related ones that Chris included in his presentation because I find that transit improvement benefits are sometimes harder to convey since, while pedestrians and cyclists are very visible as individual persons on a street, the number of people zipping by in jam-packed buses on a corridor every 4-6 minutes is often not perceived in the same way. I liked how these images tried to “unpack” those individuals and their magnitude.
While I’m still curious about the rationale behind some of the final design choices on the Potrero project–particularly around the cycling amenities and why a little more separation wasn’t possible from other modes–I thought this example from San Francisco was a great one to share. If there are others that you know of that visually communicate benefits of walking, cycling and transit improvements in other projects, I’d be interested to see them.
If nothing else, as we work together to create vibrant communities with a diverse suite of quality transportation choices, the examples from Victoria and San Francisco are a great reminder that attaining the future is dramatically influenced by how well we visually paint the picture of what we want it to be.
And while we’re waiting for the future to catch up with us, come on in and have a seat at my kitchen table: there are plenty of well-aged municipal budget pie charts to share at the back of the fridge.