4 Ways to Bring Your Public Outreach into the 21st Century
Overcoming the common challenges of public outreach
Getting feedback from your community is an essential part of developing good transit service, but it’s not without its challenges. Public meetings sometimes feel like classroom lectures; diverse representation can falter when the same people attend every meeting; and planners often struggle to present technical ideas in a way the community understands.
There’s no silver bullet to public outreach, but here are some strategies for working together with your community to plan the best transit possible — and how technology can help you bring your public outreach into the 21st century.
1. Make traditional public meetings more interactive
We’re all familiar with the standard public meeting where staff behind a podium presents information to the room with time for questions. It works to inform, but it doesn’t always engage.
At BJCTA in Birmingham, AL, Wytangy Peak-Finney and her staff were frustrated by this classroom approach, and with some dramatic system redesign proposals coming out of their TDP, they were eager to find a way to get the public more involved in the changes.
So for their next public meeting, planners set up stations around the room with monitors at each station showing a Remix map of the proposed Phase 1 recommended changes. In small groups, the public could directly engage with the proposed routes and ask questions of the staff on hand. At one station, there was even a blank Remix map where attendees could draw and share their own ideas. The BJCTA team left the meeting with confidence in both the quantity and the quality of the feedback they received. The planning team knew they were on track to meet the needs of the community.
2. Directly engage on social media
Most people use social media as a primary way of communicating with others and getting much of their news. Gold Coast Transit District in Ventura County, CA, understands the power of social media, using it to communicate out service alerts, educate riders, solicit feedback, and even hosting contests.
After a public meeting discussing the tradeoffs of an upcoming service change, the planning team took to Twitter to solicit more ideas. One rider made a route suggestion for a potential BRT line, and GCTD’s planning staff took the opportunity to quickly sketch the proposal in Remix to see who the route would serve and how much it would cost to operate. By sharing the screen shot on Twitter, GCTD was able to directly engage with the rider AND their followers, pushing forward a meaningful discussion on service trade-offs.
3. Use visuals as a universal language
Sometimes it can feel like planners and the public are speaking different languages. But when there’s an actual language barrier, getting actionable feedback can be nearly impossible.
At a recent public meeting at Rochester Public Transit in Rochester, MN, community members gathered to provide feedback on the latest Transit Development Plan. The room had a mix of native English speakers and ESL speakers, but what they had in common was a dependence on transit to get to work.
The TDP included changes to Route 12, which connects the Century Hills and Emerald Hills neighborhoods to job centers downtown — and for many of the people present, the current plan made them walk over a mile to reach the bus.
Based on comments, staff started adjusting the map live, pulling the route deeper into the neighborhood while demonstrating in real time what the changes to the route path would mean in terms of timing and cost. “We were able to draw a new route in real time, in about 20 minutes, instead of having to go through several iterations of maps with meetings in between,” says Bryan Law, Transit Planner at RPT.
Attendees helped translate and relay each other’s ideas and reactions, all while RPT’s team tried their suggestions and everyone could see the impacts of each turn. “We also were using easy-to-understand maps, which made a big difference with this particular audience of recent immigrants with varying levels of proficiency in English,” Law adds. Ultimately, Law’s team was able to quickly make route changes based on the comments of the residents, and demonstrate tradeoffs between time, cost, and coverage visually — a language everyone could understand.
Reflecting on the meeting, Law said, “This was perhaps my favorite public-meeting experience ever, since we came up with a solution that everyone liked, and some of our riders left the meeting knowing that they had a real constructive impact on shaping their transit system.”
4. Take to the streets
When an agency is soliciting feedback or input from the community, no technology can truly replace the effectiveness of going to the people and talking face-to-face.
This is precisely what Rachel Ede, Transit Manager for Santa Rosa CityBus, was considering as they embarked on their outreach during their “Reimagining CityBus” network redesign effort. Supplied with surveys, posters of their three scenarios, and good old fashioned pens and paper — all wheeled around in an eye-catching little red wagon — CityBus staff conducted a kind of pop-up public outreach campaign. “We took our roadshow everywhere,” Ede says.
CityBus’s outreach plan also included online surveys, community planning challenges, and even a webinar. But taking the outreach to the streets proved overwhelmingly effective compared to relying solely on community meetings. They were able to reach many more people and probe into the specific feedback on what changes would work for people and why.
Perhaps most important with such a dramatic system redesign, they were able to hear from people who had never used transit. “We learned so many things we didn’t know about our community,” Ede says, “and we have a robust new system to implement as a result.”
The value of direct engagement
Each of these instances emphasizes the value of direct engagement, and creative outreach doesn’t require you to reinvent the wheel. Next time your agency solicits feedback, don’t be afraid to get creative and use technology to better engage with your community.
