Public meetings on transit plans typically draw the same people making the same old points.
Attendees tend to be older, whiter, more affluent, and more highly educated than the constituents who most need proposed services.
I know this as well as anyone, having served as transit chair for the Montgomery County, Md., group of the Sierra Club. That experience also taught me that listening to a diversity of voices helps transit projects serve as many people as possible.
Finding ways to capture a variety of public voices, particularly those of daily transit users and frequent bike riders and pedestrians, was the topic of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Public Engagement that Counts. Participants in the recent webinar also explored ways to translate public feedback into usable data.
Gathering input on transit projects that serve diverse areas – like low-income and immigrant neighborhoods – is crucial for gaining support. It is also difficult.
“Community buy-in is often the difference between a successful project and having to go back to the drawing board,” announced NACTO’s Nicole Payne, the moderator, as the webinar opened.
Advice from three localities
A theme touched on by all three webinar speakers – representing Minnesota, New York City, and Philadelphia – was the need to start engagement efforts early, preferably before detailed plans are created. This allows community members to propose what could become key parts of any plans.
Early in the process is the time, the speakers agreed, to find out what people really think, what might best serve them, and where their comfort levels rest. Early is also the time to explain realistic options in accessible ways while still doing more listening than speaking.
According to Inbar Kishoni, deputy director of public engagement for New York City’s Office of Bicycle and Pedestrian Programs, information should be gathered to “use the feedback you’re getting as data for your design, rather than as cherry-picking to support your project later on.”
Waffiyyah Murray, Philadelphia’s Better Bike Share Partnership manager, added that it is crucial to “incorporate equity from the very beginning.” This can be especially important for transit referenda. Although such proposals pass at a high rate, getting actual users to vote for transit would improve the odds.
It’s “a lot of work,” Murray admitted, before adding that “once you build that system of trust and open communication,” the payoff is huge in reducing resistance and spurring success.
Kishoni drove home this point about the value of widespread outreach by noting that token community engagement processes “set us up to overvalue certain voices like squeaky wheels, and it sets us up to battle NIMBYs.”
Meet the people where they are
Engaging more people means going out on the streets and to the libraries, movie theaters, shopping centers, and parks where the people are. It means talking to everyone from kids to business owners. It means engaging online audiences as well on places like Facebook.
Too many transit stakeholders find it impossible to attend a public-planning meeting without paying for child care or taking time off from work. In the long run, an inadequate public engagement process just creates more frustration and work than putting in the effort from the start.
The New York City Department of Transportation addressed this problem by creating its Street Ambassadors program. Ten ambassadors, drawn from numerous communities and half of whom spoke Spanish, engaged 32,000 people concerning 82 projects during 2016, said Kishoni. In 2017, more than 21,000 engagements occurred, generating ideas for creating in-depth surveys and following up.
As one example, Kishoni described questions about barriers to bicycle commuting, revealing that many people are scared to ride in the street. This feedback led to the development of maps showing the most useful and practical bikeways.
Using all the tools
The more tools used to collect feedback the better.
Engagement can take many forms, from brief person-in-the-street interviews to mailed surveys to games designed to teach about transit options. Post-it boards at meetings can be useful for getting feedback from attendees who are too shy to speak in public or are limited by time restrictions. And, of course, creating online portals and making sure members of the public know where to access them increases participation in transit discussions.
While making this point, Katie Caskey, policy planning director for the Minnesota DOT, also noted that different engagement tools come with different costs. For instance, each worksheet completed by an individual at an all-day workshop cost $194, while worksheets at more-conventional meetings cost an average of $99 to generate. Participants in a Zombie Pub Crawl completed worksheets for $24 per head. The best value came from the state fair, where worksheets were completed at a unit cost of $1.40.
Still, the idea was not to save money, but to reach out to as many groups as possible for actionable feedback. Gathering useful data means going out of your way to hear from people who are too often marginalized due to their “age, gender, race, geography,” Caskey said.
In striving to ensure representation for all Minnesotans, she is particularly careful to do outreach in multiple languages and to get the opinions of women. The latter is important because “the planning community is heavily male,” Caskey noted.
Finally, effective engagement means following up on initial contacts throughout the life of a project, even once it is up and running. Kishoni likened the process to dating a future spouse: A long-term commitment is needed, but it all starts with the initial advance.
Photo of public meeting by SoundTransit/Flickr.