Citation

Brown B, Gunby K, Strausz-Clark J, Frugé A, Glaze S, Findlay M, Tuia J, Hajnosz I, National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Transportation Research Board, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. NCHRP Res Rep. 2019; 2019(905): 1-P2.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP); National Academies Press)

DOI

10.17226/25447

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

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. In addition to these "compliance motivated" reasons for assessing the effectiveness of public involvement, transportation agencies are also using 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 involve- ment approaches. This project addressed this gap by developing and testing survey and scoring tools that transportation agencies can use to measure the effectiveness of their public involvement efforts from the public's and the transportation agencies' perspectives. These tools can be used on all types of projects, such as new construction, infrastructure repair or change, and long-range plans.

Creating the Public Involvement Effectiveness Survey

The research team's goal was to create a tool that measures the effectiveness of public involvement, while also being user-friendly and doable given the typical constraints faced by transportation agencies...

...Through this research process, user-friendly survey and scoring tools were developed to measure the effectiveness of public involvement. The survey and scoring tools can be used by transportation agencies--and non-transportation agencies--that conduct public involvement. The following is a list of resulting benefits:

• The survey results provide a way to target areas for improvement and track such improvement over time. This aspect will be of particular interest to agencies adopting a performance measurement framework that includes the measurement of public involvement effectiveness.

• Using the survey improves relationships with affected communities since the public will have a means for providing feedback not only on transportation projects and plans but also on the public involvement processes.

• Transportation agencies that use these tools will demonstrate the seriousness with which they take their responsibilities to conduct effective public involvement.

This PDF is available at http://nap.edu/25447

Language: en