Public Involvement: Important, But How?

Getting meaningful input from the public on transportation priorities, projects, and the like is a good idea. It's also a requirement for all the metropolitan planning organizations in the US, who have to prepare, and follow, public participation plans that document how members of the public can have meaningful input into their transportation planning processes.

Across the country, MPOs do all sorts of things to get this public input. Most, of course, do the tried and true stuff of holding public meetings, doing mailings and surveys, etc. Over the past decade, more and more avenues of innovation have emerged, too, as MPOs find new ways to reach out to their community, experiment with social media or other new platforms for engagement, and try out a variety of clever strategies for achieving public involvement.

Between MPOs' evolving approaches in public involvement and the changes in transportation law under MAP-21, it was time for some good guidance to help the planning community share its practices and approaches. So, the Federal Highway Administration recently published a 2015 update to its "Public Involvement Techniques for Transportation Decisionmaking." This guide, which is available on the US DOT's Transportation Planning Capability Building Program website (https://planning.dot.gov/), is a helpful, 171-page compendium of practices.

But here's where it gets interesting. There are a lot of transportation planners who are struggling to find the time to read a 171-page document on anything, even when it's good stuff. After all, the vast majority of MPOs in the US are in urbanized areas of less than 200,000 population, and these smaller areas' MPOs have very few staff --- the typical small-city MPO has two to four staff people, and these staff often have to juggle multiple responsibilities within the agency where the MPO is housed.

So, if you were wondering why FHWA has engaged my organization to help a handful of small-city and rural planning agencies with their stakeholder engagement processes, I've just let the cat out of that bag. Our plan is to help these small agencies identify the issues, topics, or processes around which the stakeholder engagement is sought, and then we're going to try to match them up with some public involvement strategies - effective ones, of course - that they can carry out in their communities, with the staff and resources they have at their disposal, so that some good results come about. It's a challenge, but it's a fun challenge to have.