I compared two ways to get a crosswalk installed and the boring one won big time
So last summer I spent 4 months gathering 30 signatures, making a slide deck, and showing up to every single city council meeting for that crosswalk near the park on Maple Ave. Then my neighbor Bob, who could not care less about traffic stuff, told me he just called the city's pothole hotline and said the faded paint was a safety hazard. Two weeks later they repainted the lines and added those little plastic bollard things. The crosswalk didn't happen but the street feels way safer now. I should have just done that from the start instead of my whole PowerPoint theater. Has anyone else found the complaint hotline shortcut works better than the official process?
Tbh the hotline didn't really get you a crosswalk either, it got you paint and some plastic posts, which is a different (and much cheaper) fix than what you were asking for. Complaints about stuff that's already broken or worn out move fast because it's a repair, not a budget fight with engineers and traffic studies. Your slide deck was for a new thing, and new things basically always take longer no matter how you ask.