The August Blender: Planning Committees Come Together

Come September, we will be nine months into the 18-month Master Planning process for a network of on-street protected Bikeways. Our Master Planning process has five committees made up of 80 people from 56 partner organizations. With assistance from the Community Builders Network, we gathered all five of our planning committees together for our first Blender of the Master Planning Process.

For the past four months, these parties have pledged to ensure recommendations for outreach, design, destinations, routes, affordability, and land use policy that will support a more just community. The purpose of this Blender was to allow all five committees to convene for the first time and openly discuss the ideas, thoughts, and plans each committee has created thus far. The goal of our Blender was to make sure the committees are keeping each other in-check with the ultimate goal of our Master Plan, which is making St. Louis safe and easy to ride and walk around using the planning lens guiding principles.

Overall, The Blender had high energy and very important thoughtful conversations happening with the 60 people in attendance representing all five committees. Bob Lewis from Development Strategies made a comment to Trailnet about how we’ve gone about the Master Planning Process since his day-to-day work deals with using data to help people do their own planning. He shared that, “Planning is at its finest when we all get together to learn from the data and figure out a mutual future.” This is exactly what our committees did throughout this day of learning and developing to ensure our plan is meeting the planning lens. Most committees learned what areas they could improve on and got a better idea of what the right track looks like for the Master Plan.

Please click here to watch a short recap video of the days events.