Transportation Planning and Public Participation: Theory, Process, and Practice

By Ted Grossardt and Keiron Bailey

Transportation Planning and Public Participation: Theory, Process, and Practice explains why, and then how, transportation professionals can treat public participation as an opportunity to improve their projects and identify problems before they do real damage. Using fundamental principles based on extensive project-based research and insights drawn from multiple disciplines, the book helps readers re-think their expectations regarding the project process. It shows how public perspectives can be productively solicited, gathered, modeled, and integrated into the planning and design process, guides project designers on how to ask the proper questions and identify strategies, and demonstrates the tradeoffs of different techniques.

Readers will find an analytic and evaluation framework - along with process design guidelines - that will help improve the usefulness and applicability of public input.

• Shows how to apply quantifiable metrics to the public participation process
• Helps readers critically analyze and identify project properties that impact public participation process decisions
• Provides in-depth examples that demonstrate how feedback, representation, and decision modeling can be integrated to achieve outcomes
• Demonstrates basic principles using examples from a wide range of types and scales
• Presents tactics on how to make public meetings more efficient and satisfying by integrating appropriate visualizations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jun 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780128129579

Ted Grossardt

Ted Grossardt is the founder and president of VoxPopuli. He currently consults on a range of public infrastructure planning and design projects and teaches graduate courses in transportation planning and public participation. He served as the Decision Support Systems Research Manager at the University of Kentucky’s Transportation Research Center for 15 years, where he and Dr. Bailey formed their foundational collaboration. He continues to deliver public participation workshops to engineers and planners throughout the US and Europe.

Book preview

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Chapter 1

Public Participation in Transportation Planning and Design

Theory, Process, and Practice

Abstract

The goal of this book is to create the expectation of measurably excellent public participation processes in all transportation projects, and to show why and how that must, and can, be done. The authors’ data clearly shows that the public’s expectations for good process are reasonable, but are not being met by professionals. In this chapter, we discuss how transportation projects come to exist, who the concerned entities are, what their motivations are, and how all of this combines in the dynamic of a transportation project.

Keywords

Transportation project; Arnstein Gap; public process satisfaction; The Public

A major bridge design project is underway, and the project management instructs the geotechnical consultant not to conduct an analysis of the river bottom—because they fear that the consultant might discover one or both of the bridge piers will be resting in mud instead of rock. This eventuality would increase costs and delays in the project, and they do not want that. The geotechnical consultant is aghast. This is completely unprofessional, dangerous, and potentially disastrous. In fact, the consultant is professionally (not to mention morally) bound to insist on the analysis or resign from the project and report the potential malfeasance. Avoiding the facts is clearly irresponsible, violates the consultant’s PE license, and is a dramatic abuse of public trust and public money.

The same project management instructs the Public Participation Professional (PPP) consultant to conduct the absolute minimum public outreach required by National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), because they fear the public will be resistant to the project, or want to make changes to the preferred design, and this will increase costs and delays, and they do not want that. They are instructed to have a meeting or two to show their preferred design, assert that other possible designs are unsuitable or will not work or are too expensive, and be done with it—even though the project team knows none of this is true.

What does the public participation consultant do? Although the project management may be responding in a minimal way to legal requirements to host public meetings, there are no specific standards for what constitutes due diligence in public participation, nor are there criteria for outputs or documentation of what the process accomplishes. Nor is the consultant is licensed or held to any particular professional standard of formal education or performance in the field. Thus, the consultant has no professional obligation to uphold or refer to. And it is difficult to argue with the bridge designers that the public is somehow qualified to help them come up with a bridge design. The consultant may have some moral qualms about the whole thing, but such considerations are nowhere to be found in the contract or the Request for Proposals (RFP). Arguing too strenuously that it would be a good idea to get some real, meaningful public input may cost the consultant their contract. If the team can cobble together something that looks good, and build more or less what they like, while observing the letter of the law on public participation (if not its intent, which is to provide the public with a channel to influence the design or plan) then no one will be the wiser. To the outside observer, it is still a dramatic abuse of public trust and public money, but there are few levers for translating that into proper action.

The goal of this book is to create the same expectations for public participation processes in transportation projects as for all other project analytic processes, and to show how and why that can and must be done. It is also to demonstrate how this is beneficial for all stakeholders.

The Challenge

High-quality public participation in transportation planning and design—often termed public involvement in official discourses, or citizen engagement in others—is merited on both political and pragmatic grounds, as we will show. Some form of public participation is also often required to satisfy legal mandates and project sponsor requirements. However, the public participation domain is complex, and education and training requirements for the field are nearly nonexistent. Consequently, such undertakings are often poorly performed, leading to frustration and a sense of wasted time and resource on the part of many involved. As an example, in the Federal Highway Administration’s Environmental Review Toolkit, under Requirements, it is stated that these include: Public involvement including opportunities to participate and comment (FHWA, 2018). Readers can see that an opportunity to participate and comment is a very open-ended requirement, and can be interpreted by the project manager and sponsor in a wide range of ways. FHWA Policy is quoted as: Public involvement and a systematic interdisciplinary approach are essential parts of the development process for proposed actions. (23 CFR § 771.105(c)). This could be a useful foundation, however, again, what does it mean that public involvement is an essential part of the development process for proposed actions? Who evaluates this process and according to what criteria? How exactly does (or can) public input help develop proposed actions? We use these as examples, because all of the existing public involvement requirements follow this model of good intent, without specification of targets, measures, or outcomes. There is more detail in scheduling and timing of public forums but almost nothing on content, or output. Nor on any measurable data, for that matter.

The problems with this situation are numerous. From the sponsoring agency’s viewpoint, such public participation may be seen to lengthen a process, or engender conflict. From the infrastructure designers’ standpoint, public participation often fails to generate useful, actionable data to help design, modify, or select plans and the entire participation component can be viewed as a tedious, unproductive legal or contractual mandate. From the public’s viewpoint, many public participation processes are time-consuming, ineffectual and often appear to have the tacit goal of limiting public input rather than eliciting hard data useful for the project. Sometimes the public feels the processes are manipulative, in that participants are being steered by sponsors in specific directions that have no basis in public desires or valuations. There are numerous anecdotes that illustrate these problems and many readers may have had their own experiences of such problems, from any or all of these viewpoints.

But this situation is more than anecdotal. In fact, there is a large gap between the quality that citizens experience now and what they want from such processes—this is called the Arnstein Gap (Fig. 1.1). The Arnstein Gap chart shows the difference between the current and desired levels of public participation, gathered by us over many years, from anonymous real-world project participants using Arnstein’s (1969) famous Ladder of Citizen Participation. This data set is the largest such international set published. It represents 18 years of data gathering in nine different states in the United States and includes the views of over 7000 citizens on 30 different projects. We will explore these data and their implications in more detail in Chapter 2, Justice and the Arnstein Gap, but for this introduction we refer to the Arnstein Gap data to point out some basic problems. First, citizens are conscious of poor levels of public participation compared with what they desire. Second, this problem is national, in fact, international, in scope. Third, this situation applies to projects of all types from two-way street conversions to transit-oriented developments to large bridge projects to interstate highway corridor routing, and even outside the transportation domain. These extensive data as well as numerous anecdotes demonstrate that it is not tenable to argue that public participation is, in general, conducted well. Specific cases will be different, but overall, the consistency of these evaluations and the pervasive nature of this problem are remarkable.

Figure 1.1 The Arnstein Gap.

Meanwhile, from the PPPs viewpoint, the meeting process can consist of managing public expectations and controlling conflict to avoid meltdown. While this is a minimal goal, not as much focus is paid to delivering useful data, satisfying citizens and providing responsible agencies and decision makers with data that supports what are often hard choices. In many cases, the poor design of public participation and poor implementation exacerbates these preexisting problems.

To illustrate the magnitude of this problem and its amazingly pervasive nature, consider that across the United States, hundreds of millions of public dollars are spent every year on mandated public participation and yet there is no official record of what was achieved at these expensive meetings, even a data point as simple as attendance! How many people attended these meetings? There is no overall inventory! Public participation stands in stark contrast to other aspects of these same projects, such as the engineering and structural work, which are budgeted, evaluated, and audited. It is clear from public record documents how much was spent on these other transportation investment and management activities, but it is not for the public participation component. The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which oversees the operations and budget of all Federal agencies including the US Department of Transportation with the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration, did not respond to an author’s written requests for information on how mandated public participation was measured. We point out that this situation is inconsistent with the drive for transparency and the growing civic demands for stronger public expenditure accountability, and it is likely to change, perhaps in the medium term. Looking ahead, when this happens, it will be more than good practice to document public participation outputs and performance; it will become mandatory.

But participation need not be approached in such a regressive, minimalist and underperforming way. In this work, we present a case for a more rigorous treatment of public participation and we define and illustrate what can be delivered with better design, including specific objectives that address the desires and needs of multiple stakeholder groups. We provide hard data to support our arguments. This is particularly important to us because often public participation is designed and executed on the basis of poorly researched and/or data-less assumptions about how such processes can and cannot work. This lack of rigor in design leads to deficient delivery and a set of undesirable consequences including public frustration and disengagement and potentially project failure (Stamatiadis, 2010). After all, according to a respected business leader, You get what you measure (Bethune, 1999). We agree: that is why we define and measure, extensively!

We discuss the ramifications of participation processes involving large numbers of citizens throughout this work. We should note that there are many public goods domains that face similar problems with mandated or desired public participation in complex, high-stakes situations, e.g., environmental management, energy infrastructure, public asset management policy such as parks and recreation, and many others. These domains can present similar problems in terms of the design, delivery, and measurement of public participation. We have worked on similar processes in numerous related domains and there are important parallels in terms of theory and method. However, because this work specifically addresses public participation in the transportation domain, and because there are some unique aspects to the transportation planning problem, we begin by identifying several key transportation-related subgroups (or semipublics) that often play key roles in transportation and related infrastructure planning.

To illustrate the dynamics and problems, we look at the problem from the perspective of each of a defined set of stakeholders. We identify what these stakeholders may expect and what they may hope for, in a more ideal world. Our purpose is to outline the relevant actors and how they interact to define a transportation planning problem, and how they proceed to engage the public. In the following chapters, we cover sets of specific design objectives. We inventory current public participation methods and classify these according to an application domain map, showing which processes are more suitable for particular contexts. We provide a systematic, analytic method for designing public participation processes. Finally, we explore and discuss specific projects in detail, to help explicate how the range of project factors and processes can interact.

So, to begin: When considering public participation, it is helpful to ask some basic questions: Who participates? What do they want and expect? What will happen?

Who Are The Public?

We begin with the large group termed the public. The public is a large, complex, and fluid group of stakeholders, consisting most importantly, but by no means solely, of large numbers of citizens. Beyond these unaffiliated citizens, project managers frequently deal with formal and informal subgroups of citizens that are assigned or acquire specific responsibilities, or require specific handling within the context of the NEPA process or because of other legislative requirements. The most common types of groups are:

A. Advisory Panels/Committees/Councils (e.g., Citizens Advisory Board);

B. Consulting Parties (e.g., Section 106 Historic Preservation);

C. Self-organized Interest Groups; and

D. Environmental Justice (EJ) Populations.

The total number of participants and the mixture and proportions of these groups depends on the specific project and a host of other factors discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 (Project Formation and Public Participation Process Considerations; Gathering Information From Public Participation Processes: Feedback Tools and Mechanics, respectively), but their existence presents challenges for project management and often for other stakeholders in the process. In part this is because of the proliferation of resource demands required to involve and manage these groups, but more significantly, because they require and demand differential access to project information and decision-making. Their existence creates in effect a kind of tiered citizenship and their role can be unclear to other stakeholders, or even a cause of friction and conflict.

Advisory panels and the like are typically appointed by the project team in consultation with the project sponsors. As such, they unavoidably consist of a rather narrowly defined group already known to the sponsors, and so may share their general views on the problem at hand. Advisory panels are given considerably more access to technical information and influence over the direction and design of projects than the typical citizen. While advisory panel meetings are technically open to the public, it is rare that the meeting schedules are widely advertised, and these meetings typically (in our experience, almost always) treat the general public attendees as observers, not participants. In essence, the ordinary citizen is relegated to watching the committee members perform their role.

This approach has several disadvantages. First, it insulates the advisory panel from gaining a clearer picture of community values and preferences. This is particularly problematic because advisory panels cannot be truly representative of a community’s thoughts and ideas, despite their best intentions (see Chapter 6, Dialog and Outcomes: Process Design With a Purpose, for evidence in a specific project, where this question was directly addressed by project management). Second, it can undermine citizen confidence and trust in the activities of the sponsoring agency and their contractors when it appears that the advisory panel input is sought more keenly, and it can be believed that their preferences are accommodated ahead of those of citizens at large. This may in fact be true under certain conditions. Third, the sponsoring agency may develop a propensity to prioritize advisory panel input and may be inclined to use their views as a stand-in or representative sample of the views of the citizens at large, further reducing the actual and perceived role of these citizens. This is a serious mistake because it can lead to unnecessary conflict and even process failure. We discuss cases where this has happened and address the specific challenges of integrating advisory panel input more effectively later in the book.

Similarly, the solicitation of groups and individuals to sign on to projects as consulting parties under the NEPA process also has the effect of creating tiered citizenship. Such entities have disproportionate access to ongoing project information and may be invited to certain types of project meetings, allowing them to affect processes in ways not available to others. Such entities may also exhibit influence through the assertion of representation on behalf of other citizens. While State Historic Preservation Offices and related historic preservation groups serve an important role in many transportation projects, they can have the perhaps unintended consequence of muting or filtering the views of other citizens regarding potentially historic properties. Ironically, they may even hinder their own interests if general public opinion about an historic resource is not solicited, in favor of only the judgment of the consulting parties. We will show that separately convened processes for artificially created separate groups is often an inferior approach. These problems can typically be dispensed with when using appropriate group techniques (see Chapter 7, Advanced Multicriteria Applications, for examples of data gathering strategies that address this problem).

Self-organized interest groups can also constitute a special level of access to a project. With the goal of avoiding disagreements, project personnel may accept the legitimacy of self-organized groups and their claims of representation. While we are not discouraging citizens from organizing around transportation projects, it is important for professionals to recognize what level of input is appropriate for such groups. Money and people skills can generate their own forms of local power, so much so that the authors have observed active resistance and attempts at subversion of democratic processes by leaders of interest groups fearful that they would discover that they did not represent majority views. (Especially within their own group.)

There is considerable discussion around the role and legitimacy of such interest groups (e.g., McAndrews and Marcus, 2015). They may be constituted as a set of neighbors with a shared geographic interest, or a group with shared socioeconomic interests and attitudes, or an existing entity that chooses to get involved in a transportation project. Depending upon who is involved, such groups may elevate the issues of people who would not customarily be involved in the transportation planning process, or conversely they may amplify the already powerful voice of community elites in deciding how transportation resources are to be deployed. We intend to provide means and mechanisms to more thoroughly and democratically (by which we mean accurately) empower citizens so that transportation projects can be more efficient. That is, the project comes as close as possible to addressing the most important needs of the population it affects.

Such opportunities for clarity have arisen in past projects. At a public meeting for a particularly contentious transportation planning study (complete with angry crowds and signs), the authors were using an Audience Response System (ARS, keypad system) to help ensure democratic and anonymous feedback from the participants. A member of the Advisory Committee seized on this idea and insisted, early in the meeting, that a yes or no vote be taken on whether to stop the entire project. Inasmuch as all of the alternatives, including the do-nothing alternative (which was the equivalent of recommending no action), were to be evaluated separately anyway, this seemed unnecessary and we explained this to the committee member. They were undeterred, and so after some consultation with team members, the vote was taken. It failed by a 2-1 margin, and the meeting continued, with a much more subdued audience. Without having such a process in place, the takeaway in the newspapers the next day would have highlighted what appeared to be overwhelming resistance to the project. Instead, clear majority support for completing the study was documented and it