Week 1: Meet Our Transportation & Planning Team!
Transportation & Planning Team’s Mission
We create opportunities for City Heights residents to shape their streets, community, city, and region; everything in the built environment ranging from transit systems to parks.
City Heights is one of the most beautiful communities in California due to our diversity, history of grassroots leadership, and active community involvement. City Heights is also home to tens of thousands of climate heroes—folks who walk, bike, or ride transit to get to where they need to go.
However, quality of life in many south-of-the-8-freeway communities like City Heights, has been undermined. This is due to decades of disinvestment of public resources, exclusion from the planning process, and decisions that prioritize the movement of high volume car traffic over transit and Complete Streets. As a result, residents experience a disproportionate level of traffic violence, health disparities, high transportation costs, lack of parks, inefficient transit, and dirty air.
Several members of the T&P team touring the new pedestrian improvements along El Cajon Boulevard. See more about our advocacy work this past year in a future post.
The Transportation & Planning program interfaces with community members and government agencies to reverse that by facilitating policy/systems/environmental change in a way that leads to livable, healthy neighborhoods.
Our program’s philosophy is that you shouldn’t have to have a degree in planning to plan your community. The Transportation & Planning Program innovates the field of urban planning by implementing creative, accessible, and fun opportunities for everyday people to have a big impact in their community, city, and region.
Residents trust our planning initiatives because we don’t just plan to plan. We plan to implement. We utilize advocacy to ensure that community-shaped plans are implemented. By mindfully balancing planning with advocacy that leads to results, residents are encouraged, energized, and empowered to participate in democratic processes.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more about the Transportation & Planning team’s work and successes coming soon!