Spokane Transit commissioned Jarrett Walker + Associates to lead community stakeholders in a interactive workshops, as part of a larger process to prioritize projects and consider raising new revenue for transit.
The event brought together local leaders in business, education, healthcare, social services, and other key sectors. The workshop helped these leaders understand the fundamental choices that transit presents us with. They then applied this new understanding to prioritizing future Spokane projects in the context of a sales tax referendum.
The workshops featured two interactive planning games. The first exercise used a fictional city, and was designed to help participants explore how the tools of transit work and what trade-offs naturally arise, in an environment where their own interests were not at stake. The exercise introduced a set of high-performance transit projects and showed how much of a sales tax increment each project would need. Participants then ranked the projects up to a limit defined by the level of sales tax that they personally would support.
Long before this engagement, Jarrett Walker also led the planning tasks on a major redesign of the Spokane bus network in the late 1990s, while at Nelson/Nygaard.