Building while Biking

As this class in Active Transportation has moved forward, it has become increasingly noticeable as to how much actual finagling and muddling in conversations one must do to get any sort of grip on the task at hand. To have excellent communication skills is a requirement of any planner. Attending the Lynch Woods meeting at the Brighton Town Hall is a case in point. Though what really made this an understanding for me is what Jon noted in his GRATS presentation today-- that the major realization is in order to induce any sort of social change ie) to do something this radical with bikes, we must first have a biking community...basically people...to flesh out and encourage the change.

Therefore my focus has made a shift. And this is perfectly OK. I've started this project with multiple ideas in my head in regards to MCC... that I must find the most desirable bike/pedestrian pathway from MCC to RIT while keeping the ultimate goal of GRATS in the background. Or collecting data on how many students, who like myself, are actually traveling from MCC to RIT. Though Jon explains today that the idea generation is much easier than actually building the community first. And really the community must be built before the ideas fall into their respected spaces. So I am tweaking my primary objective, I am now focusing on people, the who is who at MCC. Maybe becoming a sort of "liaison" between what I am learning in ATP class at RIT and actually finding the people who are in the community who have the power to accelerate these many ideas. This actually seems like a more achievable goal considering the time given in a quarter and is laying the foundation for my other objectives.