Norm Van Eeden Petersman  0:06  

I'm so glad you're with us here today. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and these Bottom-Up Shorts are a way of introducing you to regular people, or even remarkable people that are making a real difference where they live. My hope is that you'll hear their story and think, yeah, I could do that too. I something here connects with you, please let us know. Today, my guest is Christine Corrado. She is a Brighton council member since 2018 and a Strong Towns member since 2023. As a resident of Brighton, she founded Brighton Safe Streets for All, and has served on the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Envision Brighton 2028 steering committee, the Conservation Board, and she's currently chairing the Public Works Committee and serves on the Community Services Committee. You'll hear in our discussion today how Christine has pressed ahead to make the streets of her community safer and more prosperous for all and really building up the community capacity to build lasting wealth and and vitality and vibrancy within the community of Brighton. Christine, thank you for coming on Bottom-Up Shorts. Welcome.

Christine Corrado  1:08  

Thank you, Norm. I'm glad to be here. This is very exciting.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  1:12  

Let's begin with Brighton Safe Streets for All. In the name, we're capturing this whole recognition that our streets are places for each person to feel dignified, to feel welcome, and to feel safe. Can you describe the origin of this and what you're currently working towards?

Christine Corrado  1:29  

Sure. It started because I was really naive about how to make streets safer, but I knew that something had to change. So to put it in a little bit of context, Brighton is a small inner ring suburb of Rochester, New York. So we're semi suburban, semi urbanish. Slightly more dense than, say, a suburban sprawl community or a town very far from an urban core. A lot of the kids in our community walk or bike to school, and they walk and bike to school along a route that, although New York State designates it as an official state bike route, it has zero amenities for bicyclists. So kids bike on the sidewalk on their way to school, crossing guards do their best to navigate the the inherent conflicts between pedestrians, bicyclists, and cars. There is one particularly quirky intersection on the way to the middle school, and a middle school student on her bike was zipping along, paying attention to the best of her ability, but she's 12, right, and not too seasoned a bicyclist or aware of how drivers function. One driver stopped at the intersection to give a courtesy wave through to the bicyclist. The light was not in the bicyclists favor, but from where she was, she couldn't see that the crossing guard is trying to pay attention to everything else. And the driver on the opposite side of the road who had the light in in their favor, clocked this little girl on her bike. Thankfully, she wasn't terribly injured physically. She had some broken bones and some physical therapy took care of things, but she was really psychologically wounded. And everyone else involved there was. And this was the little girl that I knew personally and knew that she was not a rash little kid. This was not the sort of thing you could pin on the child completely, if at all. And I was energized. I'm like, "What can we do to make this particular intersection and all of the streets in Brighton safer, so that our kids can bike to school, so they have that autonomy that they deserve as they're growing up and growing more responsible, more independent? So, thanks to social media, I put out a call to parents in Brighton and said, "Hey, I'm forming this group Brighton Safe Streets for All." And that was it. We gathered independently and informally in the first few months of trying to shape something, some kind of action group. We didn't get a lot of traction in person, and not too long afterwards, the covid pandemic made us all go virtual. From there, it has remained largely a virtual group. It's a great space for exchanging information, sharing information, hearing from the community about pain points throughout. So it's not just the routes to school. It's everywhere, whether you're driving, walking or biking. So that's the very long story to a very small, informal but informative organization that helps now inform me as a council member.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  5:14  

I think one of the most crucial bits of it is giving color to the number of near misses and other discouragements to going out on foot or on a bicycle. Because often those discouragements or those near misses are the things that become like a surreptitious disabler. It's not overt, but you're like, "Oh, man, maybe I shouldn't actually do this." And that actually is the contrary to what Chuck describes of creating a culture of walking, creating a culture of using a bicycle to get around. And when that becomes more commonplace, then all of a sudden some of the other assumptions begin to fall into line with that as well. So yeah, I love that vision of safe streets for all. Similarly, here in Delta -- the Local Conversation group that I help lead is Deltons for People Oriented Places -- we're just trying to put first things first and really keep that front and center. Now this ties into some of your work with the Envision Brighton 2028 project. Do you want to describe this effort to work with the community to understand where you want to be? You've got elected in 2018. 2028 is coming up rather quick. What's that been like? And what advice perhaps, do you have for folks that are looking to do something similar in their community?

Christine Corrado  6:37  

Sure, yeah. So because I started to be recognized as an advocate for safe streets and a smarter built environment, I was appointed as a resident to the Zoning Board of Appeals in Brighton. In many towns, the Zoning Board of Appeals is where you go and say, "Hey, I want to build something and it doesn't conform to code. Please give me an exception." And I learned a lot from the community about what what people want that doesn't meet code. So the town was embarking on basically its strategic planning process with the comprehensive plan. Comprehensive plan in New York State is a land use plan, but it can also include informing the community, or sourcing from the community, what the vision is for how that land is used. It's not just "We're going to plunk big box stores here and housing here and something else over here." It's, "What do we want our town to look like in 10 years time, based on where we are now?" I served on that committee as a representative of the zoning board, so there I'm already seeing where we're running up against code that says you have to build a certain way, but property owners want to build differently, and it was usually in a way that would make it a better neighborhood, a better building, a better anything. So the underlying ethos of the comprehensive plan that we wrapped up together in 2018, it was a three year process of sourcing community input about everything like, "Do you want walkable streets? Do you want dense business downtown? Do you want mixed use? Do you want or do you want to keep everything segregated and apart? Do you want open space? Do you want it preserved and denser building in the core of the town?" A million questions that all were posited largely on sustainability. We took the approach of saying that, if we are to see our communities thrive and survive in over the next decade and beyond, it literally has to be sustainable. And we're talking ecologically sustainable, financially sustainable, conceptually sustainable. So the outcome was our our strategic plan, our comprehensive plan, our roadmap, so to speak, to the future. A lot of it included things like more sidewalks, more village feel more of everything that Strong Towns advises is valuable for creating value and good quality of life in a community.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  9:31  

And critically, as well, from a financial perspective, those are often things that require less investment than the alternative of doubling down on on roadways and things like this that actually are very expensive to not only establish, but then maintain. I think this is where the work that you've done with the Conservation Board caught my attention too, because part of the Strong Towns message is that we need to make much better use of scarce resources. That's what our ancestors knew to do. They knew to make very careful use of scarce resources so that they could endure. And one of the challenges that conservation authorities and boards have to grapple with is, "What are the present day and long-term implications of committing to one path or to another?" Can you describe how perhaps Strong Towns has helped your consideration of some of these questions of conservation, and also how your work on that board has helped to shape your vision of what we should value in our places and what we should be seeking to do as we balance these things?

Christine Corrado  10:28  

Sure. It's a fascinating question, because it goes to the the mindset that all humans are trying to make sense of the world around us, and we're influenced by the people that we're engaged with. And I should be clear, the Conservation Board is a citizen board in the community. It's part of the government, but it's all citizens, it's advisory. Now as a council member, I serve as a liaison between this citizen board that's charged with all things conservation, giving the town government good advice, and the government itself. So our conservation board is made up of folks who are environmentalists, who are academics, who are civil engineers whose mantra is not "pave the world" but thinking more in terms of "save the world". In working with this group of experts, I have learned it's a really good compliment to the Zoning Board of Appeals, because Conservation Board, in many cases, is looking at site plans for property development, or looking at the health of street trees, or looking at what we intend to do with our parklands. And there is always that friction when humans brush up against the environment and have that impact on it. How do you find  that sweet spot where we can still build, develop, create a built environment that makes it possible to be human and civilized, and still preserve what makes it so pleasant? The recurring theme with the conservation board is always street trees. We know that having a tree canopy in our community makes it more pleasant. It makes property more valuable. It helps mitigate heat island effect. We're here in the Northeast of the United States, and it should be cool and lush much of the year. And because of heat island effect and climate change and all of those other things, a lot of communities are baking at this point in the year. We are not quite as hot and miserable as as some nearby neighboring communities, because we've got this tree canopy, but we also want the sidewalks. And trees and sidewalks in combination are lovely if you don't have to worry about maintaining either one, but if you're the one in charge of maintaining the sidewalks safely, those tree roots are a pain in the neck. The shade of the trees over the sidewalk or the street makes that whole freeze and thaw cycle harder, because the shade doesn't allow the evaporation. So you get a lot of icing over, then melting into the sidewalk or into the street, then it freezes and pops the sidewalk and the street up. It's just that continual push and pull maintenance cycle. And until you sit with entities like the conservation board or with the highway department, for example, responsible for our streets and sidewalks, you may not be aware of that inherent conflict. And of course we want street trees, we want sidewalks, but there are costs in both cases. How do you balance out the cost?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  14:13  

Yeah, I appreciate that. I actually wrote an article, I think last week or the week before, on how to get street trees and sidewalks to coexist and some of the different strategies that are there. At times, it can be a slightly longer path to take. If we commit to our values, then we'll actually do those types of things. And I think that can be really important. Can you share a little bit more about yourself and what your was journey to becoming a very accomplished council member and a participant in your community as you are now?

Christine Corrado  14:46  

Sure, let's see if I can distill this into just a couple sentences. So I grew up in a community and in a time when career guidance wasn't as robust as it is now in many places. So, you know, classic Gen X, little feral, had to figure it out myself. So I started out my career as a teacher. I was teaching Spanish in the Midwest and English in Spain, and so I had the opportunity to see how communities are shaped, how how different countries and communities approach that conflict between how humans can live in a space and still have nature about them. So I didn't know in that early part of my career that there was such a thing as an urban planner. Who knew, right? Fast forward to landing back in the Rochester area, after time in the Midwest, time in Europe, I started to observe the world a little differently. By the time I came back to Rochester, I was car-lite in my approach to life. I didn't need a car in Spain. I really didn't need a car too much in Madison, Wisconsin. So trying to bike around a city that, once upon a time, was a huge bicycling city. I mean, if you go back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, Rochester was at the forefront of the bicycle craze. Not so much anymore. So seeing that city from the perspective of two wheels more often than in a car, realizing that transit wasn't serving me very well in this city. By then, I had a very Midwestern mindset of, "Well, of course I can get this changed, because I can just go knock on the door of city hall and they'll take action." Well, it works a little differently in the system here than it does in other places. But along the way, it was a matter of learning more, reading more, bumping into Strong Towns, bumping into local organizations in the Rochester area like Reconnect Rochester, where they're focused on making our active transportation more active and more accessible, and learning from friends and neighbors how they're all approaching all of that. So yeah, I missed my calling. I wish I could be sitting at the table on the professional side of things and saying as maybe an engineer at the state DOT, "Hey, we're doing this all backwards. We need to be looking at pedestrians and bicyclists before we look at drivers in terms of how we construct our roadways." I would love to be a developer, "Hey, if I'm going to be building this new property, shouldn't it be mixed use? I'll get more bang for my buck, and the community will do better." But instead, I'm a nudge, I'm an advocate, I'm a convener and collector of ideas that hopefully will come to fruition if I just keep leaning on them. So yeah.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  18:13  

I love that. I like the self label of being a nudger, maybe that'll catch on over time. You're right, there's oftentimes that need for that little movement, that little shift, and then over time, for that to accumulate and build. As we close, what are the things that are giving you hope?

Christine Corrado  18:42  

All right, social media can be a little bit of a sticky wicket, right? But in the social media conversations that are basically our public square in Brighton, I see more people calling for things that align with Strong Towns thinking about how to make the most value out of your built environment, how to get the most out of your main street, how to make things human scaled, not car scaled. So seeing the the mindset shift from "Oh, of course, everything's car first. Why would you want to walk there? Why would you want to live next to a cafe? Why would you want the schools near the commercial district?" That's no longer a given with the majority of the population in Brighton, and we have opportunities to really put those things to work. Our main street, Monroe Avenue, connects the city of Rochester to the village of Pittsford a little way away. It cuts straight through the middle of Brighton. It is a state route, so the New York State DOT has authority over it and the responsibility for maintaining it. We are on the cusp of a complete resurfacing of that roadway right now. It's a stroad. It is designed entirely to move traffic as fast as possible with as few stops as possible from the city out to this beautiful, bucolic village of Pittsford, and Brighton does not figure at all into the state DOT's thinking in terms of stopping and using and who all can be using that road. So we're in that long lead up of discussion with the state DOT and design to say, "Hey, we know you have to resurface this route. When you do it, let's go from four lanes, two in each direction with no shoulder and virtually no stops and no pedestrian crossings. Let's give it a road diet. Let's give it one lane in either direction, center turn lane, nice bike lanes." And this is that route that the state says is a bicycle route, but has no bike amenities. We want those bike amenities. We want pedestrian crossings. We have a large Orthodox Jewish population. During Shabbat, they cannot touch the beg buttons to cross the street, but they've got to get to their place of worship one way or the other. So working to incorporate all of our community into the ultimate, final paved project. And the exciting thing is that the state DOT wants to hear from us. This is newish in this region. It's a new relationship that we have with the state DOT because we've been bending their ear over the years and naively or strategically working to get them to come around. So the last iteration of the potential plans that we saw had bike lanes, center turn lane, one traffic lane in either direction, and crosswalks all the way along. Still not perfect, still some room for tweaking it, but that gives me so much hope that we are now being heard by the authority that maintains our main street. And when that gets implemented, I'm hopeful we'll see a change in the businesses that line the street. We'll see the businesses that are there thrive. We'll see the empty spots get filled in. We'll see some redevelopment that looks like what we put into our vision plan, in Envision Brighton 2028. It won't be fully realized by '28 but we're literally on the road to it. So that gives me a lot of hope.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  18:42  

I love that. That makes me super excited. Christine, thank you so much for coming on Bottom-Up Shorts.

Christine Corrado  18:42  

Thank you. This was a delight.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  22:33  

I agree. If you love what you hear, please do share with us any of your feedback, any of your insights. Go visit Brighton. Go visit Rochester. Continue to find places in your community where your voice and attention is needed, much like Christina has done. Taking note of small opportunities and then beginning to build upon them, taking note of serious stories within your community and asking important questions about that. All of that is what we can do together as we strive together to build great communities. Take care and take care of your places.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  23:54  

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.