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public input into ongoing projects

Posted on July 20, 2011 in Public Outreach

A frequent reader asks

In your experience, what are the most effective means of maintaining public input into an ongoing transit project? Assuming they are a possibility, are formal advisory committees the way to go? Informal contact with the project team? Public meetings? A project storefront? What do you do to ensure that public concerns have some weight as the concept is translated into perhaps a less-than-ideal reality? If you have citizens' committees, do you prevent the involvement of people interested in seeing the project fail? For all of these, I am interested in the perspective from both sides – the public and the professional – and in any tips you might have.
Professionals, please leave your thoughts in the comments, including links to good resources on this.  It's not my core speciality.
But in my experience there are three questions here:
  • What media should be used for public communication?  On this, I think the best practice is "get the information out there in every possible medium, and invite comment in every possible medium."  Inclusion of non-techie people is important, which is why snailmail still matters.  Public meetings require so much effort from the participants that they tend to attract only people with strong views, leading to unedifying shouting matches.

  • Are there inner and outer circles of "the public"?  One common strategy is to appoint a "project committee" or "stakeholder committee" of interested people, with the idea that these people will get to know the project better, debate it more deeply, and engage with the larger public about it.  This last bit is usually what's missing.  These committees really need to reflect stakeholder communities and participants must feel obliged to represent those communities, not just their own point of view.

But the hardest and most important question is "What is the public being asked?"

I think it's very common to ask the public very general "what do you think?" questions, on the assumption that this lets everyone express their view.  It does that, but the answers to such vague questions are almost impossible to use inside the study, and a good part of the public will sense that. 

That's why I try to use questions that ask the public to consider the real choices facing the city or transit system.  That requires a process that listens and educates at the same time, and in which project planners give the public information and a framing of the problem.  This post, despite a dead link, is a pretty good overview of that mode of thought.  My network design course is also based on "planning games" that allow stakeholders to experience the tradeoffs themselves.  It's the same idea.

social media’s influence on public transit (guest post)

Posted on July 9, 2011 in Advocacy, Guest Posts, Public Outreach

Guest Post by Daniela Baker

Daniela Baker is a social media advocate at CreditDonkey where she helps entrepreneurs find small business credit cards.  She grew up in Europe where public transportation plays a huge role in everybody's life.  Public transit "consumers" like Daniela are finding their voice and publishing it on the web for all to read. With that newfound confidence, they are discussing political issues, gaining support for changes to be made when it comes to public funding and increased public transit choices.

With more and more people on the road and gas prices on the rise,  Americans are looking for a better alternative to commuting by car. Unfortunately, many transit systems can be hard for the newbie to decipher, or fall short in offering what citizens are after. Even more unfortunate, many people are unaware of the options their towns offer when it comes to transportation.

When consumers aren’t finding what they’re looking for when it comes to public transportation, they are turning to social media to help garner the influence they need to get the services they’re after. This has left many professionals scratching their heads, uncertain how social media can influence a public service.

Here are some answers as to why consumers are turning to social media when it comes to public transportation, as well as how consumers and cities are driving the social media efforts.

Americans’ sentiments toward public transportation

A poll released in March 2010 by Smart Growth America and Transportation for America found that Americans are craving more transportation options. The poll indicated that Americans would be open to doubling the amount of funding that is currently being funneled toward public transportation.

The poll found that Americans are frustrated with the transportation options that are currently available. In fact, 73 percent of respondents stated they have no options other than driving as much as they currently do. In the study, only 1 in 5 of those polled took public transportation during the previous month (this included walking) but indicated they would like to use it more; about 47 percent indicated public transportation is not an option in their area and 35 percent said the timing of routes did not work with their schedule.

These survey results were not only for metro areas but applied to suburban and rural areas as well, with respondents stating that rural areas would also benefit from increased transportation systems. In fact, 79 percent stated that in rural areas the U.S. would benefit from expansion and improvements made to both bus and rail systems. Eighty-two percent of suburbanites shared the same sentiment.

Why social media

In the past, when a consumer was looking for information, they would go to the local library to research an issue or visit town hall for information on public services. If they were unhappy about the services provided or felt that there was a need that was being missed, they would meet with their elected official.

Nowadays, citizens are going straight to the Internet to get answers and try to make change. With social media like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and websites created by the common consumer, people are making real connections with people who they have never met in person.

Nielsen Research wanted to see just how large of an influence social media has on today’s consumers. This question was answered with a study they conducted in 2007. When asked what sources they trust, chat/discussion comments and blogs ranked two and three on the list, just behind other consumers. Other choices included brand websites, TV/magazines, radio, sponsorships, search ads and banner ads.

Citizens making public transportation more convenient

Tech savvy individuals have started to take action by creating social media outlets that help fellow commuters find the information they need to make public transportation options work with their commute.

PBS.org has profiled one such effort – IAmCaltrain.com, which is utilizing web technology to make regional commuter train schedules easier to decipher. The site allows commuters to type in their starting and ending destinations and it maps the closest train stations and shows when trains are scheduled to arrive.

As websites like IAmCaltrain.com and commuter-driven blogs continue to be created, they are encouraging others in their area to embrace the transportation systems that are available to them as well as voice their opinions about what could be improved.

Cities increasing awareness of public transportation

Cities across America have started to embrace social media to help encourage their citizens to take advantage of the public transportations that are available to them. June 16 was the 6th Annual Dump the Pump Day, sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). APTA partnered with cities across the U.S. to encourage citizens to park their cars and utilizing public transportation for the day.

As reported by StatePress.com, the City of Tempe was one of the public organizations that participated in APTA’s annual event. City employees turned to a method they knew would be effective to get the words out to Arizonians—they went to Twitter and Facebook to encourage residents to choose public transit, showing the cost savings available through using alternative modes of transportation (gas prices in the Phoenix area have been hovering between $3.50 and $4.00 per gallon since 2008).

Outside of government, citizens and the private sector are asserting greater control over transit information.  Google Transit is now the go-to source for routes and schedules over much of the world, and many transit agencies are increasingly deferring to Google rather than maintaining their own expensive systems. 

More importantly, Google’s standard public data formats let anyone access route, schedule, and even real-time location data.  As a result, entrepreneurs have developed countless web and phone applications to present and customize transit data, so that customers can increasingly choose the style and emphasis that they want in their own information.   Down at the grass roots, activists are even drawing new styles of map for their transit systems, promoting these through social media, and getting their transit agency’s attention as a result.

What Comes Next?  Innovation

Most leading transit agencies now have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and some put significant effort into both listening and communicating via these tools.  The trick, of course, is not just to listen for suggestions and opinions, but also to notice how the whole communication task is evolving as new tools are invented and new ways of using them arise.

The hardest challenge for transit professoinals is simply to be open to innovation arising from the social media sphere.  Sometimes, online innovators will do something better, and more cheaply, than a transit agency can do it.  As that happens, the transit agency's interest may lie in encouraging public innovation, not trying to control or limit it.

mapnificent breaking through?

Posted on June 4, 2011 in Education, Maps, Public Outreach, Simulation

Mapnificent
As WalkScore's fine transit travel time tool languishes in extended beta, the alternative, Mapnificent, is getting some mainstream blog attention. 

I may still be alone in this, but I as I explored with WalkScore's Matt Lerner here, I believe this tool, whoever finally perfects it, has revolutionary potential.  It can easily be converted into a two-digit transit score which, unlike the WalkScore Transit Score, actually describes people's ability to get places.  But it's bigger potential is as an alternatives analysis tool.  When you city is facing a series of possible alternative transit projects, what if every citizen could use a tool like Mapnificent to see the exactly impact of each alternative on their mobility, and that of people and destinations they care about. 

A major problem in transit politics today is that negative impacts of a project are obvious but benefits are often described in terms of ridership and development outcomes — things that don't matter to the selfish present-minded citizen.  We will always have selfish present-minded citizens, and I'd rather work with them than complain about them.  Until we help people see the way a proposed project will change their lives for the better, sensible transit projects will continue losing these debates.

online “map movies”: useful?

Posted on February 7, 2011 in Connections, Transfers, Legibility, Maps, Marketing, Navigation, Public Outreach

Can animation help people understand their transit options?  The Rotherham Metro Borough Council in the UK has done some simple "map movies" that highlight the paths followed by buses and trains.  Here's a still:

Rotherham map movie still

Watch the actual animation here.

As they stand, they're limited in usefulness, as the icons move along the routes with no indication of frequency.  They certainly do advertise complexity, which is accurate; this looks like a very complicated network.

But it's easy to imagine taking this to the next step, showing by animation the scheduled paths of all the services in a transit system.  This would be especially helpful in helping citizens understand pulse systems, where the integrated scheduling pattern is an essential part of how the network gets you where your going.  Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure this has been done, but I've never seen it on a public information website, which is the obvious next step.

Beyond “Transit Scores”: an Exchange with Matt Lerner

Posted on January 24, 2011 in Maps, Mobility, Public Outreach, Technophilia

Matt Lerner of WalkScore.com and I recently exchanged emails about WalkScore’s “Transit Score” product, which provides a two-digit score supposedly capturing the usefulness of transit at any address in the USA.  It’s designed on analogy to the successful (if still controversial) Walk Score, a similar tool for summarizing how friendly a place is to walking.  For example, 300 Turk Street, San Francisco is scored 100 (perfect) on both Walk Score and Transit Score.

Transit score 300 turk

Toward another extreme, here’s 7000 Lake Mead Blvd in the far east of Las Vegas.  Walkscore is 52, Transit Score is 33.

Las vegas walkscore

Tools like these have huge potential relevance to the real estate industry, and more broadly to anyone who makes locational decisions about anything.  To the extent that we encourage people who value transit to locate where good transit is viable, everyone wins.

Earlier, Matt’s team had created a “transit travel time tool” which can be used to show you the actual area you can get to in a specified amount of time.  I used this tool as the core of my definition of mobility, in one of this blog’s earliest posts.

GoogEarth walkscore

So which is more useful, the simple two-digit Transit Score, or an actual map of where you can get to in a given time?

Here’s what I wrote to Matt:

Dear Matt,

About a year ago I mentioned your transit [travel time] tool as a useful way to visualize mobility …

The first draft of the book I’m writing … praises this WalkScore tool in some detail, as a way for people to understand the degree of freedom that transit will offer them.  I think it may be a crucial tool for helping people see beyond modal fetishes to understand how transit actually works and how to determine if transit can actually get you where you’re going.

…  Transit Score is useless to me because it encodes an intrinsic bias toward rail modes, as though rail is intrinsically faster, which is utterly misleading in a world of 6.5 mph streetcars and 60 mph busways.  [I’m referring to the Transit Score methodology’s use of a “mode weight” defined as “(heavy/light rail is weighted 2X, ferry/cable car/other are 1.5X, and bus is 1X)”.  Note that unlike the travel time tool, Transit Score lacks a way to capture how far you can get how fast, so it uses mode as a proxy for speed, fatally in my view.]

In short, whereas the earlier tool presented raw information in a compelling way that the user could use for her own purposes, Transit Score contains value judgments (“we know you’d rather ride a slow streetcar than an express bus”) which the user may not share, and thus may be an obstacle to her ability to make transit meet her needs.

So I guess I will praise mapnificent.net instead.

This issue sits at the very foundation of my current book, so as an admirer of your work, I’d like a better understanding of why you abandoned the original accessbility tool. Was it a matter of the processing required to do what’s basically a massive search of trip planners?  I can see that Transit Score is a much faster calculation, but wonder if that was the key issue.

All the best for ’11,

Jarrett Walker

Matt replied:

HI Jarrett,

Good to hear from you.

You’re right that we are promoting Transit Score over Transit Time Maps — but we haven’t abandoned the transit time maps.  We are working on new ways to use them and they are still available here: http://www.walkscore.com/transit-map.php).

Here’s why we’ve been promoting Transit Score more heavily.  Our mission is to promote walkable/transit friendly neighborhoods and we think the best way to do this is to have Walk Score / Transit Score on real estate listings.

As we developed Transit Score we looked at a few methods of calculating a Transit Score.  The two finalists were our current method (detailed here) and a method where we summed the Walk Score under the area of the transit shed in our Transit Time Maps.  In practice, the scores were very similar between the two methods so we chose the current method which is much easier to scale (we show millions of scores per day).

We want to boil down transit access into a score so that it can appear on real estate listings and people can compare locations.  ZipRealty.com has added our Transit Score to millions of listings and we have some more partners on the way.

We did not see a lot of consumer/partner interest in the transit time maps — which is unfortunate because of course I love them.  One scenario I’m hoping to promote with our Transit Time Maps (we just need a partner) is to allow people on real estate sites to search by transit time.  E.G. find me an apartment within 30 minutes of work on transit.  I’d also like to integrate the transit sheds into the standard Walk Score experience.

I like the simplification Mapnificent made which was to not include walking time in their transit sheds — this makes it much easier to compute.

So to sum up, I like your suggestion of avoiding any mode weight value judgments — it just turns out that in practice our current method was very similar and easier to scale. Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Also, we’re launching a beta of “Street Smart” Walk Score later this month and we’d love your feedback on that too.

Happy New Year!
Matt

To which I replied:

Matt

Thanks!  … Suppose, hypothetically, that you had the processing power and datasets to run a purely mobility-based Transit Score.  Let’s call it a Transit Mobility Score.  The algorithm would be something like:  Identify the area reachable in 30 minutes on transit from the selected point (I choose this because it seems to have a long history as an acceptable commute time).  Then, grab the MPO’s database of population and jobs by small zone and calculate the percentage of the region’s jobs and population that are in that 30 minute band.

That also gives you a 2-digit number, but now it’s a fact rather than a score.  You’re saying: “If you locate here, you’ll have convenient transit access to __% of the region’s activity.”  And that strikes me as something that a realtor could value, understand and explain.  How far are you (or someone) from being able to do that kind of algorithm?  Obviously you’d need to have the MPO on your side, so start with somewhere like Portland where they generally are.

Frankly, you’d probably want to do two such scores, one based on your mobility at 8:00 AM and another for your all-day mobility — say, at 1:00 PM.  But I think a realtor could make sense of those too.  Everyone understands that transit in the peak is different from midday, and that both matter.  Suburban areas, especially those under the influence of commuter rail and commuter express buses would show quite a difference between the two.

I think this could be huge.  Because the output is a fact, not a judgment. …

All the best, Jarrett

Matt replies that this “sounds like an awesome planning tool and one we could potentially pursue if we had a grant or something to fund it.”

I still think this could be huge.  What if everyone making a locational decision could go to something like the WalkScore travel time tool or Mapnificent and see a map of where they’ll be able to get to in 30 mintues on transit?  It would finally make our mobility visible.

And if we could measure our mobility so accurately, for so many hypothetical cases, we just might value actual mobility more, and be less distracted by unreliable symbols of mobility — like, say, whether there are rails in the street.  Technophiles shouldn’t be too alarmed; many people will still have modal preferences.  But meanwhile, those of us who just want mobility would be able to measure it, fast, for anywhere that we might be locating something, including our homes.

can you balance california’s budget?

Posted on January 21, 2011 in Public Outreach

Bravo to the Los Angeles Times for this California Budget Balancer "game".

I've long believed that the only way to nurture a civilized democracy is to give voters the opportunity to struggle with the real choices that government faces.  My own work has included developing games and decision tools that enable communities to think about their choices in transport and urban form. 

Budget balancers bring the same principle to the hard choices that are expressed in a government budget.  Everyone's balanced a household budget, or at least monitored their spending and seen its consequences. 

Yes, they contain a million assumptions and simplifications, but once you've played with them you may well ask:  "And why does the real thing need to be so complicated?"   Good question. 

chicago: asking the right question?

Posted on January 5, 2011 in Chicago, Public Outreach

Hey chicago

Alex Davies in Treehugger looks at a Chicago campaign seeking public input on what would make people use sustainable modes:

Over the last few weeks, Chicagoans have been asked a simple question: "What would encourage you to walk, bike and take CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) more often?" Ads posing the question in buses, subways and public spaces invite the city's residents to respond with their ideas, via text message. This mass call and response is part of Give a Minute, a campaign created by advocacy group CEOs for Cities and media design firm Local Projects, which looks to take public dialogue out of town meetings and into the streets. The idea is simple: by making participation as simple as sending a text message, Give a Minute will bring more people, and ideas, into the debate.

We've long known that this kind of outreach is needed to have a useful conversation about new transit projects.  The old solution — inviting people to attend public meetings — has always produced highly skewed responses, over-weighting the angriest feedback.  Anything that can broaden the conversation is useful.

But for reasons explored here, I generally advise against grand hypotheticals: "What would you do if …?" or "What would encourage you…?"  Nobody can answer those questions accurately, so the answers are a poor guide to what investments would really pay off.

What's really needed is to engage the public in thinking about real tradeoffs, such as the choices built into budgets.  What are your priorities, this or that?  Those hard choices are the real work of elective government.  If we ask people to think about those questions, we not only get more reliable answers, we also encourage citizens to ask smarter questions themselves.   

Public Surveying: The Quicksand of Hypotheticals

Posted on March 18, 2010 in Marketing, Public Outreach

A recent post looked at the challenge of surveying the public and identifying what mixture of taxes and fees they would be willing to pay to fund a widely desired infrastructure plan.  In the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Independent Inquiry into public transport in Sydney, we did exactly that, using a survey team from the University of Technology at Sydney’s Centre for the Study of Choice.   One commenter caught the crucial point about why polling is so difficult, and why its results are often hard to trust:

There’s always a difference between what people say they want, what they actually want and what they actually do.

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