The context
Newcastle City Council has in a place a Cycling Strategy that aims to make Newcastle ‘Fit for Cycling’. The intention is to enable everyone in the city, including young and old, to feel safe and empowered to consider cycling as a realistic choice. We have targets to significantly increase cycling for everyday trips recognising that providing space for people on bikes is key to both achieving our ambition, and supporting the local and national campaigns calling for this.
Your challenge
The City Council’s transport planners have a formalised model for civic engagement in transport infrastructure schemes. They are interested to review the method and consider alternative propositions that relate new technologies that enable civic engagement to their existing process.
Current popular examples of changes to transport infrastructure in Newcastle are Blackett Street (in the City Centre) and the Blue House Roundabout (near Gosforth). In the summer of 2018, Blackett Street was closed to traffic on weekends as part of the Great North Exhibition. Transport planners of the council equipped the street with a range of sensors to measure the impacts this temporary intervention had on shoppers and commuters.
Your deliverables
The challenge for this project is to come up with a creative proposition that can increase the chance for proactive and positive dialogue with stakeholders in the city to inform transport schemes.
The ideal outcome would be something that planners can use to understand the needs of specific stakeholder groups. A more standardised way of collecting views of a broad spectrum of those will disabilities and/or mobility impairments would be useful given that we currently have quite a disjointed approach of individual meetings with the likes of the disability forum, Vision Support etc whose views may not be representative of everyone. This is especially relevant for Blackett Street.
Potential solutions could include, for example, an app to facilitate civic engagement with transport schemes through playful and visual means of engagement. You should identify a number of inspiring examples of technology use elsewhere that can underlie your final proposition.