Jim Willis

I'm really happy with the feedback I've received about our meeting on Wednesday night and I'm flattered to have received several emails from people who really liked the introductory talk I gave and wondered if I'd wanted to share my notes from it.

The things is, I don't use notes when I talk. I write an essay and then try to memorize it. I usually get nervous as all get-out and end up reading from the essay even though I don't need to, but anyway, this is the essay that I composed mostly in my head as I rode my bike to work on the Wednesday morning of the meeting. Obviously there were some choice slides/images accompanying this talk but I hope you enjoy it even without them being included.  If you just want to skim the piece, I put the thesis of the essay in boldface so scroll-down.

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Good evening.

My name is Jim Willis.  Some of you know me from the Eastside Park Neighbors Newsletter that I send out. Others may recognize me from seeing me around town in our family’s pedal-powered minivan. Most people though will know me as Jay and Jack’s dad.

I’m not a urban planner or an engineer and I know very little about road design and I will be the first to admit that things like figuring out the timing of traffic lights seem like complete magic to me.

I do however know a little bit about what I believe makes a place a good place to live:

- Feeling like our family is part of a diverse and mutually-supportive community.

- Being able to accomplish most of our daily tasks without having to get in the car.

What has become apparent to me since helping to put together this meeting tonight with Jenny and Marc is how dependent upon each other these ideas of community and walkability are.

Community and walkability are very much one in the same.

When my wife and I talk with friends who live in really nice sub-divisions of less-densely populated suburbs in Monmouth County there are a couple of things that bring into focus just how fortunate we are to live in a town like Red Bank.

First off, we know a ton of our neighbors.

Not just one or two but upwards of a dozen of them who are all within walking distance.

Neighbors who we can and do call on for a cup of sugar or to watch our kids in an emergency or to join us for beers around a fire in the backyard.

In sub-divisions out in the suburbs the really, really lucky few may have one or two neighbors within walking distance that they can call on but here in Red Bank because of the higher-density of housing, the possibility exists for us all to have many, many more “walking-distance” relationships.

Not everyone avails themselves to that opportunity here in Red Bank, but just the fact that it exists is a huge benefit to living here.

The second big difference that comes up when we speak with our friends who live out in the burbs — and this becomes a really clear point of contrast when we talk to our friends who have kids of a certain age —  is that our kids have no idea what a play date is.

In the low-density burbs, play dates that involve packing up the car and working out the logistics of dropoffs and pickup times are just a way of life. 

In our neighborhood in Red Bank, the kids get home in the afternoon from whatever school they go to and roam from backyard to backyard acting out their collective role-playing fantasy du jour until it’s time for dinner. 

Now this hasn’t come without effort. It has taken a lot of time and energy to help to foster this type of community. It doesn’t happen on its own. A great neighborhood needs cultivation and care and attention.

Mostly though, having a really great neighborhood  just takes being “neighborly” towards the people in our community.

Unfortunately, the skills that it takes to be neighborly aren’t easily cultivated through the windows of your house and car.

Mostly, it seems that the skills that it takes to be neighborly are cultivated when you are out on the sidewalk.

So community and walkability are tied together sort of inextricably here. If we can’t or won’t get out of our cars  then we are that much less likely to be contributing to the cultivation, care and attention that our neighborhoods need to thrive.

But if you are here tonight, I’m guessing you probably already feel something similar to this.

So the real question we want to try to answer here tonight is what can we do to make it safer and easier for us to get out of our cars.

This is not something that’s going to happen overnight.

 It is going to take many actions from many different parties over a long period of time.

But what is paramount is that we are getting together as a community to articulate some sort of vision of what we want our community to be and figure out what steps we need to take to get there.

Historically, these actions are taken by the responsible parties in isolation and historically, at least according to a recent study from Rutgers, they are not as successful as they could be.

This is because each party, whether it’s the police or the engineers or council acts as an independent agent performing its task. However, what the data shows is that if a community really wants to make a long-lasting change to the way its residents get around, each of these agents must work together towards a “comprehensive package” of many different solutions.

“The most productive and effective way to encourage bicycling [or walking] is through a comprehensive and integrated package of many different, complimentary interventions including infrastructure provisions and pro-bicycle programs, effective public policy and supportive land use planning. “ – paraphrasing Rutgers study.

It’s with this goal of a collaborative, community effort in mind that my neighbors Marc Dostie and Jenny Rossano organized this event. We think that Red Bank is an unbelievably amazing place to live and we want to help make it even better by making it more walkable and bikeable. We don’t think we’re alone.

Our primary hope here tonight is that by bringing the stakeholders together in one place, we can help to prevent the splintered, isolated and piecemeal solutions that research demonstrates are typically not as successful in increasing walking or biking and instead we can find some way towards a more comprehensive solution that includes input from all parties, but especially includes input from as many residents as possible.

Tonight we’re going to have a few brief presentations by a couple of your neighbors as well as  Captain McConnell and Elise Bremer-Nei on the Safe Routes to Schools program that will be the lynchpin which ties together many of our initiatives here tonight.

A few quick groundrules:

- If you have kids with you who are being disruptive or making it difficult for your neighbors to hear the speaker, please be respectful of others and step into the hallway

- Please hold all questions until the Q&A portion of the agenda. All of the speakers will be sticking around to answer questions and we want to get thouhg the presentations as quickly and efficiently as possible to move on to the q&a

- Most of all, let’s approach tonight with some perspective and remember that we’re fortunate to be here having a discussion about getting safe routes to schools when in many parts of the world there are people would love simply to have a school that they could worry about getting a safe route to. So with that in mind, let’s be neighborly towards one another.

Thank you all for coming out here tonight. This meeting tonight is the first step towards what will be a very, very long journey towards transforming Red Bank into a more pedestrian and bike-friendly town. The journey would hardly be worth taking if it didn’t include a way to help our kids get to their schools more safely. So with that in mind, we are fortunate tonight to have with us the State Director from the NJ Safe Routes to Schools program, Elise Bremer-Nei.

The Asbury Park Press ran a piece about tomorrow night's Red Bank Safe Routes program that we're running at the Middle School Auditorium. 7PM. 

There will be child care for kids over three and English to Spanish translation available.