Integrating online deliberation into transportation investment decision-making: Preliminary reflections on a field experiment

1.0 Introduction Transportation agencies across the U.S. are challenged in their efforts to engage the public in the problems of prioritizing regional transportation improvement projects--such as highway expansions or new light rail lines--and determining how to fund such improvements. These decisions are typically shaped by a variety of local, state, and federal laws as well as the competing transportation and land use priorities of different communities and municipalities within a metropolitan region. Most commonly, the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) and State Department of Transportation (DOT) fulfill the federal mandate for public involvement by publishing a draft transportation improvement program (TIP) for public review and then convening public meetings to facilitate the gathering of comments (Lowry et al. forthcoming). In other words, the MPO and DOT produce a list of transportation projects and funding sources allocated to pay for those projects and then ask the public if the list is acceptable. Involving the public at such a late point in the decision process severely limits their ability to shape the goals of the TIP as well as which kinds of projects and funding mechanisms to consider. The Participatory GIS for Transportation (PGIST) research project2 set out to develop and test an alternate, and potentially more meaningful, way to engage members of the public throughout the transportation improvement programming process. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this project, our research team consisted of scholars with backgrounds in social science, geographic information science, information science, decision science, transportation engineering, and web interaction design. The result is an innovative new website called Let's Improve Transportation which combines web mapping and online deliberation capabilities with a structured five-step decision-making process designed to enable large groups (200+) of participants to asynchronously collaborate in the construction, evaluation, and selection of their own transportation improvement program.