Engaging Citizens in Bike Lane Proposals: A Toronto Experience

In downtown Toronto, a new bike lane usually means one less motor vehicle lane.  There is almost always a trade-off between cycling safety and motorists speed and parking convenience. Competing interests and strong emotions make bike ways one of the most controversial pieces of City infrastructure.  Jason has planned and managed countless workshops, meetings, drop-in events and online surveys for the Toronto Cycling unit, with a track record of popular Council approval for implementation. He will share his best practices, tips and lessons learned.

Jason Diceman, Senior Public Consultation Coordinator for the City of Toronto
Jason empowers organizations by facilitating constructive public consultation, effective large group deliberation and participatory decision-making.  He leads the planning and implementation of large multi-stakeholder collaborative meetings that lead to clear outputs and the design and management of affordable and productive online and offline community engagement processes. Jason has managed public consultations programs for many challenging City projects, including the redesign of Front Street at Union Station, new roads and bridges in Liberty Village, controversial multi-use trails, Gardiner Expressway financing and Toronto's first cycle track installations. Along with having insight into many engagement methodologies, Jason has created his own innovative paper based idea rating sheets materials and techniques for efficiently finding agreements among large numbers of people in a variety of face-to-face and out of meeting environments. In 2016 he is introducing a new invention called Feedback Frames.