Measuring the Effectiveness of Public Involvement in Transportation Planning and Project Development

Book excerpt: Public involvement programs provide transportation agencies and the public with a means for exchanging information about planning and project development activities. When effective, public involvement activities enable the public to participate in transportation decision making. Transportation professionals need to measure the impact of public involvement activities to ensure that they are successful and an efficient use of public resources. In addition, repeated measurement can track an agency’s performance over time, demonstrating ongoing commitment to public involvement and increasing overall accountability in the transportation decision-making process. This report presents a field-validated and practitioner-ready toolkit for measuring the effectiveness of public involvement activities. The toolkit is designed to collect feedback from the public on several indicators of effectiveness and to compare that feedback with the agency’s own perceptions. The combined responses can then be used to calculate scores for each indicator and an overall effectiveness index. This allows for systematic comparison of the effectiveness of different public involvement strategies over time.