How do you develop mutually beneficial partnerships with a community you’ve never interacted with before? ASU student Roxanna Patterson learned the answer to this question when she became project facilitator of International Traffic Solutions, one of the first collaborations between ASU and the City of Yuma.
The partnership began in June 2006 when Yuma City Administrator Mark Watson briefed ASU for Arizona, an initiative that facilitates university-community alliances, about the need to design a community like Yuma as an international city. Intrigued by this concept, Patterson, one of ASU for Arizona’s first student interns, proposed to work on the facet of international signage and traffic routing. As a result, ASU for Arizona and the City of Yuma partnered to create a strategy for Yuma and other cities to design routes and signage that compliment the international traffic in southern Arizona.
“Throughout the year, I relied mostly on skills I learned in leadership communication,” states Patterson, who took courses in Leadership Communication and Project Management to prepare for her internship. “And by working in the City of Yuma, I learned how to be effective in front of different audiences.”
These audiences included Yuma’s police chief, traffic engineer, and other city representatives Patterson interviewed to learn which traffic issues they felt were most important. As she spoke with them, she discovered several common concerns.
“Right now some international trucks carrying hazardous material to a military base in Yuma are getting lost in residential neighborhoods because the routes aren’t clearly marked, traffic signs are in English and they use the mileage not the metric system,” explains Patterson. “Truck drivers have to convert for gas, time, and distance – so there’s a lot of room for error.”
Patterson also found Yuma is interested in making its routes to Mexico and Canada more visible since a new port of entry and highway are scheduled to be built in Yuma, enabling more international traffic to come through the city and stimulate their economy.
Despite this common desire for a better traffic system, however, Patterson learned community members were reluctant to discuss this issue as a group due to political sensitivities and different views on which traffic problems deserved the greatest attention.
To give Yuma residents and other interested parties a chance to address traffic issues in a safe environment, Patterson and Watson organized a half-day work session in April. At Watson’s request, the session followed Yuma’s Master Thinkers program, a system that encourages participants to prioritize problems, brainstorm multiple possible solutions, and consider the benefits and drawbacks of each idea for different organizations.
For Patterson, enabling Yuma community members to generate and assess ideas through this organic process can help a community claim ownership for its own development.
“ASU is really interested in providing a service that’ll have a positive impact on the community – we’re not consultants so if the community is not interested in using an idea, we have no incentive to convince them to use it,” she says.
This approach proved challenging for Patterson, however, who needed to alter the project to emphasize different traffic issues as the city’s priorities changed.
“It’s hard when you work in one direction and the city says no wait, we want to go another way – you have to be okay to let go and not have any personal ties to a particular idea,” she states. “One way we overcome disagreement is to do weekly reports so all the advisors know what’s going on. We also do telephone conferences and type up our notes for our advisors so they understand what commitments we’ve made and what commitments they’ve made.”
To help ensure that Yuma guided the direction of the project, the work session was facilitated by Kay Eldridge, Yuma’s Training and Development Program Manager. Patterson remained involved by providing participants with information on Yuma commercial routes and different types of signage.
During the session, Eldridge asked participants to identify the issues, benefits, and challenges involved in creating an international traffic route. When asked to generate possible solutions to traffic problems, participants recommended traffic signs use more pictographs and minimize word use. Others suggested using advance warning signs as well as signs that showcased both metric and mileage measurements.
“The project brought a lot of attention to the issue and to the City of Yuma,” states Patterson. “Representatives from Phoenix, Tempe, Yuma County, and even Mexico were present at the work session.”
William D. Robinson, Yuma’s Chief of Police, is particularly excited by the prospect of working with groups outside Yuma that attended the work session.
“Because of my business, being in law enforcement, we’re very much interested in the regional approach as opposed to just solving the problem for the City of Yuma – so we need partners outside the city,” he says.
Since the completion of the work session, Patterson has assembled the data into a presentation for Yuma’s City Council that she will give in May. If the council finds the community’s ideas viable, they may launch a pilot program to make changes to their traffic system. Patterson hopes ASU can be involved in this stage as well.
“We’re looking into College of Design ASU students, particularly graduate students, who might want to adopt parts of International Traffic Solutions into their projects,” she says. “If there are signs that need to be developed, students from the Visual Communication Design Program or Planning Program might be able to design them.”
Barbara Shaw-Snyder, director of ASU for Arizona, believes the project was an important learning experience not only for the City of Yuma but ASU as well.
“We learned about the limitations that are present in the region, along with the political sensitivities and conflicts,” she states. “Because of this project, ASU now has a better understanding of Yuma’s capacity to accomplish new things and what ASU’s role in this region can be. Since we spent time nurturing relationships and activities in Yuma, our future activities here will be much more informed.”
Mookesh Patel, chair of the Department of Visual Communication Design, feels the relationship between ASU and Yuma could lead to future studies enabling researchers to interview and better understand the commercial truckers and tourists who travel through Yuma. With the proper resources, Patel believes the partnership can continue to provide scholarly and practical benefits for ASU and Yuma.
“I see this as an ongoing process where you think about solutions in groups, implement those, and then redo the whole process to keep revising and implementing,” he states. “And at some point we will come to a good solution and a model that can be implemented and accepted by others.”
International Traffic Solutions is supported by ASU for Arizona, a university initiative that facilitates ASU-community alliances. Every year, ASU for Arizona has students plan, develop, and manage programs/projects that can help the communities or regions around Arizona. Learn more about this group by visiting its web site.
