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5 Background Public Involvement Is Required State and federal laws set requirements for involving the public in transportation decision making. SAFETEA-LU (Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users) addressed the development of long-range transportation plans. This Act calls on Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) to provide for early and continuous public involvement prior to adopting plans or programs, give explicit consideration and response to public comment, provide timely information, offer convenient and accessible public meeting locations, and engage a wide variety of stakeholders in transportation decision making. NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) requires consideration of the environmental and social impacts of a project and outlines minimum standards for public involvement. MAP-21 (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act) requires measurement of transportation systems and environmental justice analysis to include historically underserved populations (including low-income populations and minority populations) and prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, or disability status. Furthermore, the MPOs established departmental policies to assist project teams in devel- oping and implementing public involvement. The National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) has also provided guidelines and handbooks for conducting public outreach (Wilson & Associates 1994). In an NCHRP research review in 2010, researchers concluded that most departments of transportation (DOTs) had not developed quantitative or qualitative measures of the effective- ness of their public outreach, and those DOTs that were attempting to measure effectiveness believed their measurement was unsophisticated (Morris and Fragala 2010). Measuring the success of public involvement for transportation projects continues to be a challenging effort with few validated measurement tools. Why Is Public Involvement Effectiveness Measurement Important? Public involvement is required, but it is also crucial for multiple reasons: ⢠Building public support for agency programs among those from impacted communities, as well as those who use the transportation facilities. ⢠Identifying and vetting mitigation strategies with stakeholders. ⢠Educating the public on the levels of investment needed to improve the countryâs highway, transit, passenger rail, and freight systems, and on the funding, innovative financing, and trade-offs related to different investment options. C H A P T E R 1 Background and Purpose
6 Measuring the Effectiveness of Public Involvement in Transportation Planning and Project Development Given the importance of public involvement, it is vital (a) to determine if public involvement is effective and (b) to be able to make data-driven decisions to improve its effectiveness. There is more emphasis on performance measurement than in years past, and with this emphasis comes an increased demand by the public and elected officials to provide more accountability and transparency regarding transportation decisions. Time, money, and staff (and maybe consultant resources) have been devoted to a public involvement effort about an important transportation plan, project, or program. It is important that transportation agencies take the time to assess their public involvement strategies to learn from and improve future efforts by employing a measurement process to answer these questions. Measuring the effectiveness of public involve- ment is important, because it can improve the agencyâs relationship with the public by establish- ing accountability, improving future engagement, increasing transparency, and building trust (Wagner 2013). What Are the Challenges to Implementing a Measure of Public Involvement Effectiveness? Despite the increasing interest in performance measurement, there are significant challenges to the adoption and use of a measurement of the effectiveness of public involvement. These challenges include the following: ⢠Getting all interested or affected project agencies and consultants to agree to evaluate public involvement activities. Transportation projects are complex, and some agencies may believe that adding a public involvement effectiveness measurement element into their project is too challenging. ⢠Fear of exposure to criticism and the effects it could have on the credibility of an agency and its public involvement processes. ⢠Critiques of public involvement processes may actually reflect other issues. For example, if a project faces strong public opposition, this may produce a negative bias among respondents, even if the public involvement activities are well executed. Or, because negative perceptions can be persistent, early missteps could continue to shape feedback about the public involve- ment activities that are conducted later in the process. How Is Public Involvement Determined to Be Effective? NEPA and other legislationâincluding SAFETEA-LU and MAP-21ârequire state trans- portation agencies to engage the public and stakeholders, and there are numerous resources available on how to conduct this engagement. However, there is no clear consensus on how to actually measure the effectiveness of public involvement. Some research has been conducted on the use of performance measures to evaluate public involvement activities in transporta- tion planning and decision making, but there has been little research on the actual effective- ness of these measures (Kramer et al. 2007). Also, many state, city, and metropolitan agencies have developed plans for evaluating their public involvement processes, but few have evalu- ated the effectiveness of these plans, and some have never implemented the plans. Part of the challenge is that, for each transportation project, there are different issues or out- comes to address, different population demographics of those participating, different means through which participants provide ideas and recommendations, and differences in how local officials use the results in decision making (Institute for Local Government 2015). In addition to these different project circumstances, the history, conditions, and dynamics of each community setting will also differ for each transportation project. As such, developing a tool for measuring the effectiveness of public involvement can be challenging.
Background and Purpose 7 There are also many opinions on what outcomes are important for measuring the effective- ness of public involvement. The Institute for Local Government (2015) suggests that effective measurement will evaluate whether ⢠A clear public engagement plan was developed and the actual degree of participation. ⢠There was a good process of communication to the public. ⢠Engagement process results were used in final decision making. ⢠Participants of the process were satisfied and whether they believed their input was welcomed, heard, and valued. ⢠Communication among and between transportation officials was effective. ⢠The Engagement process improved public knowledge about the project. ⢠There were lessons learned that can be applied to future efforts. Previous work also suggests that the key to measuring public involvement effectiveness is to measure whether the process was accessible, engaging, and outcome-oriented (Wagner 2013). Biggs (2015) suggests âthe best community engagement collects informed and actionable input from a large and diverse group of participants to inform decision making.â Thus, a successful evaluation will measure the following: ⢠Quantity or total number of participants ⢠Range of diverse communities that participated ⢠Quality of how input was collected and whether a variety of methods were used (online, public meetings, surveys, focus groups, etc.) ⢠Quality of information collected and used in making public decisions ⢠Extent to which public input influenced decisions and implementation Many of the previous efforts highlight what effective public involvement should look like, and what the outcomes of successful measurement should provide, but the actual measures or tools available to accomplish this task are limited or not yet developed. Purpose Consultation with the public is not only required, but fundamental to the development of transportation plans and projects. This outreach is also crucial for building public support for agency programs and securing adequate funding for transportation infrastructure. Transpor- tation agencies are moving toward the use of performance measures to assess how well they serve the public. While there are widespread resources for conducting public outreach and a growing body of literature and experience on how to engage the public, there are few practical or validated methods to gauge the success of these public involvement approaches. This project addressed this gap by conducting an extensive, systematic literature review, and then developing and rigorously testing tools that transportation agencies can easily use to validly measure the effectiveness of their public involvement efforts from both the publicâs and the transportation agenciesâ perspectives. (Validity refers to the degree to which a measurement tool measures what it claims to measure, in this case, the effectiveness of public involvement.) These tools are appropriate for use in connection with all types of projects, new facilities (bridge replacements, transit service changes, repurposing lanes, tolling, etc.) and for planning efforts (long-range plans, corridor plans, etc.).