One day after complaining that there was room for private parking spots but no sidewalk at a construction site at Wilson & Oakland, this morning I noticed the new sidewalk has suddenly opened for business. I have not heard a word from the county, but seems like a remarkable coincidence that the problem was solved less than 24 hours after the post went up (the "sidewalk closed" signs are even still hanging from the pushed-back fence).
Arlington County keeps such a close eye on the net, it's now actually faster to solve a problem by posting it to a blog than it is call in a complaint. And certainly light years faster than writing a letter ever was. Amazing.
As for the next generation of the interwebs, Arlington is slowly getting on Twitter, though updates seem to be sporadic. You can follow ArlingtonAlert, ArlingtonVAWeb, and CarFreeDiet (and of course, you can follow me.)
As I run for House of Delegates, I've been telling voters that far from being confusing and scary, new technologies like blogs and Twitter bring us closer together than ever and make problems easier to solve. Hopefully, stories like this will make convincing them a little easier.
5 comments:
Hurrah for the Green Miles and Arlington County. Communication is always the best way to get things done so thank you Miles for pointing these things out. As someone who walks that way to the Metro on a regular basis I'm glad this has been fixed.
That's fantastic!
Glad to see this taken care of as well. I walk my dog past there to Oakland park twice a day and am happy we no longer have to dodge traffic!
Well, at least your modest, not like there are 30 plus construction situations like this that they cycle through or anything. I mean, for real, they might have seen your post, but there's the other possibility, yes, that they may not have--you might do well to at least feign a little modesty in that respect
Gus, I'm not taking credit for this. I'm giving credit to the county for reacting quickly. Hence all the plugs for their Twitter feeds. Arlington County = teh awesome.
But in the future, you really want me to fake modesty? Is that like when George Burns said, "The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
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