Policy Making and Serve the Community

In my hometown, a city named Wuhan in mid China, there has been a lot of public transportation constructions in the last few years. The general principle behind all the projects should be "better serve the citizens", unfortunately, that is not always the case.

A bus stop had been removed because the government thought it caused traffic jam. But the fact was, less than 5 bus routes were allowed to stop there while other buses(more than 20) could only pass by while on the same way. At the same time, a new tunnel had been built and only cars were allowed to take the tunnel. Remember most citizens did not have a car. Buses were the major choice for the citizens to get around the city.

The removal of the bus stop forced some citizens who lived in a certain area to walk 30 minutes from another nearest bus stop to their homes.

For most of the time, before a big decision of public transportation was made, there would be notifications telling "welcome any suggestions" from the government. But the truth was, when a citizen really proposed suggestion or opinion, what he/she would probably receive from the government would be something like "you are not a professional, so you don't understand why our scheme is the best."

Do you think it would be the best solution if you need to walk 60 minutes everyday?

What I saw in the case was that, the policy makers were the ones who sat in cars. Their perspectives of public transportation were limited by their own experiences and they didn't see the real need of a larger population and they didn't have the desire to know. They may have encountered traffic jam in that certain point and they thought it would be a solution to remove it and the tunnel was an alternative if the traffic jam still existed. I agreed that the idea of the tunnel to split the traffic stream was good. I just see no reason of the removal of the bus stop.

Does the above discussion has anything to do with Library and Information Science? Yes, it does. One of the core values of librarianship is to serve the local community, to serve the patrons' needs. All the things librarians do is to bridge the patrons and the information they need. Do not take it for granted to assume you always know what the patron is looking for. Listen to them. Get to know them and understand their requirement. The principle lies in library collection, cataloging, reference service, resource allocation, etc, all aspects of librarianship.