A.M.I.S. and the Partitioning of Preference

This presentation reviews work by the researchers that combines group dialogic techniques with analytic hierarchy and GIS to bring the knowledge of large groups of people to bear on a highway routing problem. A significant question is how technical knowledge and local information can be combined, either dialogically or mathematically, to provide the most faithful and practical version of a collaborative preference surface, what we call the Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface, or AMIS. While all preferences can be summed directly for this purpose, it may be more accurate and effective to partition the preference contribution to the landscape by knowledge base (citizen, environmental planner, construction engineer, etc). This approach must be evaluated against the fact that when these knowledge experts are brought together through direct dialog, different, collaborative evaluations may emerge. This question is significant because it has implications for the differences in preference input gathered in same-time-same-place venues (public meetings or focus groups) or different-time-different-place strategies (eg. internet-based polling)

Justice and the Public\u27s Involvement in Infrastructure Planning: An Analysis and Proposal

The authors find that there is a gap between expectations and actual results in terms of public involvement processes. They suggest more structured public involvement techniques. A case study of documenting citizen\u27s aesthetic preferences illustrates their suggestions

Community Design of a Light-Rail Transit Oriented Development Using Casewise Visual Evaluation (CAVE)

The Transit Authority of River City (TARC) is in the preliminary engineering phases of developing a light-rail transit system running from downtown Louisville, Kentucky to the city’s southern suburbs, a distance of approximately 15 miles. In collaboration with the research team, TARC wished to test an innovative methodology for improving community participation in the design of a light rail transit-oriented development for the Smoketown/Shelby Park area. The Smoketown/Shelby Park neighborhood is a low-income area located to the south of the University of Louisville Medical Center. A suitable site for the station has been identified by TARC and its design partners, but no development has taken place yet. TARC has been conducting extensive outreach in this neighborhood over a span of several years and as a result the community is aware of the nature of the transit project, its purposes and benefits and has participated in the shaping of the route. Given this context the primary purpose of the research was to assist community participants identify preferred design criteria for their local transit oriented area, defined as this particular transit station and a two-block radius around it. This paper sets forth the principles of a novel visual assessment methodology termed Casewise Visual Evaluation (CAVE), describes its application to this problem and summarizes the results

Addressing the Arnstein Gap: Improving Public Confidence in Transportation Planning and Design through Structured Public Involvement (SPI)

The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, or TEA-21, enacted in 1998, following the Intermodal SurfaceTransportation Equity Act (ISTEA) of 1991, defines the “public” as “citizens, affected public agencies, representatives of transportation agency employees, freight shippers, private providers of transportation, representatives of users of public transit, providers of freight transportation services and other interested parties.” More recently the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has expanded this definition to include underrepresented groups “such as low income or minority households and the elderly”. In the last decade public involvement has been mandated for all metropolitan and statewide planning processes (TEA), and it has been integrated explicitly into a variety of programs such as Context Sensitive Design and the Transportation and Community and Systems Preservation (TCSP) program. Ideally, public involvement facilitates the understanding and incorporation of community values into the plans and designs for new infrastructure. This feedback permits the engineer or planner to assess accurately the level of understanding the public has acquired regarding the project. A positive signal occurs when the public begins to supply useful and insightful comments regar ding a proposed activity. Because they better understand costs and benefits, as interpreted by the public, the professionals work more productively and accurately toward satisfactory trade-offs. This knowledge interchange can in turn help to avoid and resolve public opposition to particular aspects of a proposed project, and even whether the project should be pursued in the first place. Construction delays are minimized and consequently, more time and money is spent on building projects that the public really supports. In the long run meaningful public involvement increases public confidence in the sponsoring agencies and public officials in general; this is sometimes termed improved “civic capacity”. For many reasons, then, public involvement should be prioritized

Culture, Justice and the Arnstein Gap: The Impact of Structured Public Involvement on U.S. Transportation Infrastructure Planning and Design

Enormous quantities of public money are spent on transportation infrastructure (TI). According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics this infrastructure spend in the U.S. amounted to almost $90 billion in 2001. In most political spheres, when public money is spent, the public demands a measure of accountability. The dimensions of this accountability depend on the character of the political system that funds TI. In most participatory democracies, ultimate accountability is exercised through a balloting system that ensures elected officials represent, to some degree, stakeholder views and preferences. However, despite enormous expenditure of public monies on TI, this type of accountability is clearly lacking. In particular, the quality of public involvement in TI planning and design is acknowledged to be deficient by the public and by many professionals. Since the public’s money is being spent, it behooves professionals to improve this situation. Our programmatic aim is to improve public satisfaction with both TI design process and product. In this article we characterize the deficiencies of public involvement in the U.S. using the Arnstein Gap as a metric. We propose a theoretical framework for public involvement based on justice. Three principles of justice originally developed by John Rawls are evaluated in terms of their contribution to the observed Arnstein Gap. We explain how this analysis informs the Structured Public Involvement, or SPI, protocol developed and deployed by the authors. The performance of SPI is evaluated using anonymous, real-time evaluations from open public meetings dealing with contentious projects. We conclude by calling for consideration on the part of professionals in non-U. S. contexts to develop and articulate theoretical models for public involvement and, similarly, to evaluate the performance of these protocols using stakeholder data

Grounding Justice in Public Meeting Practice

John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice, and Justice as Fairness were originally intended to promote a political structure of liberal democracy. Taken together with Habermas’ idea of ’discourse ethics’, this work has constituted a fundamental aspect of the communicative approach in the planning discipline over the past 20 years. While their work is quite theoretical, it need not be detached from the reality of day- to-day practice. We agree with O’Neill that the work toward greater justice and fairness is eminently practical, and so should derive from their work. In particular, we are interested in advancing justice/fairness in the arena of public infrastructure planning and design through the careful integration of dialogic group processes, technologies of representation, and the opportunistic use of quantitative analysis and decision support tools for public meetings, so as to better realize Rawls’ principles in concrete, day-to-day processes. Translating the combined objectives of distributive, procedural, and access justice into practical public meeting processes requires attention to the nature of trade-offs that arise, and highlights the functional benefits of using Rawls’ concept of the Veil of Ignorance

Participatory Routing of Electric Power Transmission Lines Using the EP-AMIS GIS/Multicriteria Evaluation Methodology

The North American electric transmission network was developed under the guidance of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) to enhance the reliability of electricity supply. The network also allows sale and marketing of electric power by one utility to another. Electricity marketing has taken on a much more prominent role with restructuring of the electric utility industry. As a result, long-distance sales of electric power have greatly increased the loading of some transmission lines, and have led to congestion on the transmission network. Recent system failures such as the northeast blackout of 2003 have highlighted the need for increased capacity. While some upgrades of existing infrastructure will be undertaken, some of this capacity must be provided through new transmission lines

Public Involvement in Highway Improvement: A Comparison of Three Different Visualization Modes for a Case Study in Central Kentucky

Public involvement in highway improvement presents a set of complex problems involving many stakeholders.Since visualizations are increasingly regarded as essential tools in this process, a clearer understanding of the specific merits of advanced visualization techniques and their potential contributions must be developed.As a step towards integrating visualizations into an improved public planning paradigm termed Structured Public Involvement (SPI), this paper investigates the utility and performance of three visualization modes, termed 2D, 3D and VR (Virtual Reality), for a case study highway in Central Kentucky. Visualization scenarios were designed and engineered according to the principle of elemental decomposition.Using a combination of iterative focus group public involvement and an electronic scoring system to solicit rapid feedback the research team investigated the efficiency and performance of the visualization modes.Further focus group feedback on the merits of each mode was solicited.The preferred 3D visualization mode was then employed to gauge public preference for (a) specific highway design elements and (b) three composite design scenarios.Cross-tabulation of focus group data enabled the team to generate a fine-grained analysis of public preference.Problems and future research directions are highlighted

Assessment of Kentucky\u27s Historic Truss Bridges

This study created an information base to improve decisions about the replacement or rehabilitation of historic truss bridges. During the first phase of the research, information on the history and design of the 109 bridges in the study was assembled. With the assistance of historic preservation professionals, 75 of those bridges were selected for further study for their potential for rehabilitation. During the second phase, the KTC research team, engineers from the KYTC bridge division, and 12 highway district engineers, who are responsible for the day-to-day care and maintenance of the bridges, evaluated the condition and functional context of the 75 bridges. The goal was to identify those that are good candidates for preservation through rehabilitation. The district engineers were of the opinion that only 14 of the 75 bridges needed to be replaced. However, there was an additional subset of 13 bridges that, in their opinion, present some significant obstacles to preservation related to functional inadequacy or some other problem with the bridge. The bridge engineers estimated considerably higher levels of effort to preserve these 13 bridges (an average of 7.42 on a 10 point scale) than for the 48 remaining bridges (an average of 3.82 on the 10 point scale)

AMIS: Least Cost Path Analysis for Transportation Planning

The State requested a GIS-based route planning tool. More than 50 raster data layers were assembled within ArcView 3.2, encompassing a full spectrum of demographic, physical, and cultural features. These data layers were given a numerical rating using multicriteria decision making software and input from professionals from a variety of fields. The multicriteria decision making software then set the relative importance of these surface features as impediments or attractors, creating a travel-cost surface. This synthesis of technologies, combined in a tool termed AMIS (Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface), found the least-cost path to any point within the study area