There’s no substitute for public outreach
Public outreach can be one of the most difficult parts of transit planning, yet it’s one of the most important. There’s no substitute for hearing how proposed changes will affect your community from the riders themselves. During our most recent webinar outlining best practices for public outreach, a panel of transit professionals explored the best ways to open lines of communications with your community.
Here are the main takeaways:
1. Know what you need before you start
It might seem obvious, but before you begin public outreach you should have a goal for what you’re trying to do. “Focus your questioning on specific needs, whether it’s redesigning your system or understanding customer satisfaction,” says Mark Kirstner, Director of Planning at Piedmont Authority Regional Transportation. “Don’t try to hit riders with too many topics at once. Everyone’s time is limited.”
Understanding your objective will also help you determine who you should be talking to. Depending on the goal of your outreach, you might need to talk to social service agencies, disability groups, or your region’s biggest employers in addition to current riders.
2. Go to where the people are
Not everyone has time to attend a community meeting. So what better way to reach riders than when they’re actually taking transit? “Over the last couple of years, the mantra in public engagement has been go to where the people are,” says Kirstner. “We just completed a fairly thorough onboard survey that compiled origin and destination data. It helped provide detail for our travel demand model in the region. Staff members literally got on the bus and talked to riders. It’s a great way to have rider attention for 15–20 minutes.”
Kelvin Miller, General Manager of The M in Montgomery, AL, says that his department got feedback from riders by using Remix to put a map of proposed changes on their website and allowing people to comment on it. “It let riders tell us what they liked and didn’t like about different routes without having to show up for a public hearing,” says Miller. “Their comments come directly from the website to me.”
3. Keep the focus on your entire system, not just individual routes
When trying to solicit feedback about your transit system, it can be hard to keep the focus of the conversation on the system as a whole. After all, riders are typically most vocal about routes they personally use. Claire Johnson-Winegar, Planning Manager at Gold Coast Transit, handles this by creating tradeoff exercises. “We ask passengers questions about coverage versus frequency,” Johnson-Winegar says. “Do they want to walk further and have more direct service, or do they want to be picked up right by their home but have less frequent service? Presenting it like this shows how complicated transit is and translates to someone that there are tradeoffs.”
It can be particularly tricky to keep the conversation on track in public hearings. Miller advises that when there’s a rider that wants to use the meeting to talk about their individual route, it’s important to strike a balance between hearing them out and keeping the conversation on track. “We don’t want to ignore that person, so we try to resolve their issue as best we can. But when we’re finished hearing their comment, we always bring it back to the entire system,” says Miller. “We show them how the entire system will benefit them. For example, they won’t have to ride the bus as long or make as many transfers.”
4. Make your agency visible to get ongoing feedback
Many agencies use social media to keep their communities engaged in the day-to-day of transit. But getting riders to engage with your social presence can take patience, time, and strategy. “We’ll re-tweet posts, and also solicit retweets from other agencies like the transportation commission,” says Johnson-Winegar. “We’ve also sponsored Facebook posts to broaden our reach.”
Kirstner says that no matter how you disseminate information, you should designate one go-to source that will always be up to date and correct. “We have an email newsletter that includes any news about accidents or holiday changes. It goes out to a robust email list and riders have really come to rely on it.”
Even in the digital age, agencies can’t neglect the importance of making themselves available to talk to riders. Gold Coast Transit sets up feedback stations to talk to riders about anything from new routes to logo redesigns. PART runs a call center that not only answers transit questions, but also collects valuable feedback from callers. And Miller personally talks to riders at transfer centers to get their take on how the M can make improvements. “I talk to people to hear their take on what’s good and bad about the service,” he says.
5. Show your progress to the board to build trust
A big part of public outreach is communicating all of your newly gathered information to your board. To do that effectively, building trust is key. “We started bringing more and more to our board so they could see the work being done by our department,” says Johnson-Winegar. “When we do get some negative feedback, they already know that we’re doing a lot to improve transit for our customers.”
Having a visual to show to your stakeholders helps get your point across. “We met with the mayor and used Remix to show how the TDP compared to current service,” said Miller. “We could actually show the population and jobs we serve, and how the system is improved using recommendations from the TDP.”
Public outreach is about your riders
Ultimately, talking to the public about transit makes you better at servicing your community. It helps you understand what riders need, get information to them about their transit system, and convey why public transit projects are beneficial. After all, public transit is ultimately about helping real people get from point A to point B, and that human element shouldn’t be overlooked.
“Once a year, we make a video for our board of trustees that highlights the riders by showing videos of what they think about our system,” said Kirstner. “It puts a face on what we do.”
You can watch the full hour-long panel discussion here:
