Community Capacity for Clean Transportation Futures
Organization: City of Pico Rivera
Funding Request: $495,000.00
Project Summary
This project, led by the City of Pico Rivera with partners Day One and Public Matters, will transform short-term outreach into a lasting civic learning system that prepares residents to understand, shape, and benefit from clean transportation investments by building trust, leadership, and technical literacy. The City already holds key assets, including a Stakeholder Advisory Group (SAG), a formal Youth Ambassador program, and prior outreach efforts, but participation is inconsistent, and engagement fatigue is common as residents respond to separate projects with little continuity. The project strengthens and connects these existing programs so engagement becomes coordinated and cumulative rather than starting from scratch with each initiative.
The work is organized around four integrated focus areas: building the engagement system and tools (reinforcing the SAG, integrating the Youth Ambassador program, creating bilingual tools, and establishing evaluation methods); using real, visible transportation projects as structured learning platforms through workshops, walk audits, site visits, and public events; looking forward through community-led visioning to set future priorities that guide upcoming projects and the General Plan update; and institutionalizing lessons learned into a reusable engagement kit-of-parts with procedures, templates, multilingual materials, and event models. The most important outcome is a sustained, community-driven engagement system that operates with continuity across issues to support long-term equitable progress, and that can serve as a replicable model for other communities across the region.
Project Descriptions and Transportation Equity
Daily travel in Pico Rivera is often unsafe, inconvenient, and costly. Residents identify high vehicle speeds, poor visibility, sidewalk gaps, disconnected bike routes, and inadequate lighting as major barriers to walking, biking, and transit, while youth and seniors report fear of traffic and long crossings, and many bus stops lack shade, seating, and clear information. The city sits within a heavily traveled network bordered by I-5 and I-605 and crossed by major goods-movement routes, bringing constant truck traffic, congestion, safety risks, and poor air quality, reflected in a CalEnviroScreen score of 72.99 and elevated PM2.5 exposure. These challenges grow more urgent as transformative regional investments (Metro light rail expansion, a new regional rail station, and the Rosewood Bus Rapid Transit corridor) approach over timelines that stretch years and even decades, raising the risk that residents become disconnected from choices that will shape housing, jobs, safety, and quality of life for generations.
The project’s central insight is that current engagement approaches are not equipped for this scale of change: project-by-project outreach creates fatigue and confusion, and communities often feel that saying “no” is their only influence. Recent experiences with the PAD Park and Los Paseos, where strong early participation declined over long timelines, demonstrate that one-time outreach is insufficient. The project advances equity by establishing a durable system that integrates community voices into long-term mobility decisions as major projects unfold, deliberately prioritizing the households without vehicles, seniors, youth, people with disabilities, and Spanish-speaking residents who experience the greatest impacts yet have the least consistent access to planning. By replacing technical presentations with “learning by doing,” focusing on why changes are proposed before what is designed, and delivering all materials bilingually with interpretation, stipends, transit assistance, and flexible scheduling, the project makes meaningful participation genuinely accessible.
Community Benefit
The project benefits Pico Rivera residents who face the greatest transportation barriers, including low-income households, seniors (16% of residents are over 65), youth (21% under 18), people with disabilities (a 10% disability rate), and Spanish-speaking community members (10% of households experience linguistic isolation), many of whom depend on safe, affordable transportation for daily life. The primary benefit is continuity in community engagement and decision-making: rather than one-time outreach, residents gain ongoing opportunities to shape priorities across multiple projects, building lasting knowledge, relationships, and leadership so those most affected have a consistent voice in how investments are designed and implemented.
Residents will also gain a practical understanding of new sidewalks, crossings, bikeways, and transit services, increasing their confidence to use them, with seniors reaching services more easily, youth gaining safer routes to school, and households without vehicles gaining clearer options for jobs and daily needs. The project builds long-term capacity by strengthening civic skills and familiarity with planning processes, exposing youth to clean transportation career pathways, and using early actions such as walk audits and site-based learning to give residents immediate influence over projects already underway. It also helps the community reimagine transportation investments and transit-oriented development as connected civic “third spaces,” especially important as the Whittier Narrows Dam project constrains traditional gathering places, so that mobility improvements also strengthen social connection and quality of life.
Partnerships and Structure
The partnership centers trusted community partners and established resident leadership bodies, defining power as access, influence, and transparency, with a clear and visible pathway from community input to real City action. The roles are organized as follows:
City of Pico Rivera (Lead Applicant and Fiscal Manager): Responsible for coordination, grant compliance, and connecting engagement to the city’s other multimodal transportation projects and plans, while providing technical information and implementation support.
Public Matters: Designs and facilitates community engagement, organizing advisory discussions, leading bilingual workshops, conducting walking audits, and translating resident experiences into clear priorities, drawing on over 20 years of bilingual, community-driven planning experience, including the East LA Moves Mobility Corridors initiative and the East Los Angeles Pedestrian Plan.
Day One: Leads the Youth Ambassador program, positioning young people as active leaders and decision-makers, with over 30 years of experience in youth leadership and community health; in 2023, the program engaged 12 students and reached over 80 youth and more than 1,500 residents citywide.
Local connectors: The Pico Rivera Chamber of Commerce engages small businesses, the Women’s Bicycle Club supports peer outreach and community rides, and Parks and Recreation and Senior Center programs help reach elders and multigenerational networks.
Decision-making power rests with residents through two standing bodies: the Stakeholder Advisory Group, a representative forum of up to 30 community members, and the Youth Ambassadors, a trained cohort of local students who participate as equal partners. Both serve as recognized decision-making bodies that review projects, set priorities, and shape recommendations before they advance to City decision-makers, ensuring multigenerational voices guide direction. Equity is embedded throughout via bilingual materials and interpretation, accessible locations, flexible formats, and stipends, and because the SAG and Youth Ambassador program are designed as permanent structures, the partnership is built to continue well beyond the grant.