Highway Corridor Routing using the Enhanced Participatory Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface (EP-AMIS) methodology

Highway Corridor Routing using the Enhanced Participatory Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface (EP-AMIS) methodology

Surely everyone can agree that the objectives are to move up the Ladder, that is, to improve stakeholder satisfaction with both process and product. Yet not all parties agree on ways that these laudable goals can be accomplished. After all, transportation planning and design processes are complex and demanding. They involve many stakeholders, often with competing ideas and goals. Transportation authorities find themselves in the middle of these currents. Public involvement is both mandated and, most agree, desirable (ISTEA 1991, FHWA 1996, also see TRB White Paper on Public Involvement, O’Connor et. al. 2000). Yet, under these circumstances, rooted in a history of mistrust and skepticism, public involvement can easily become something to be avoided or minimized instead of a genuine opportunity to improve the design product (Maier 2001).

Structured Public Involvement: What is it? Who does it?
To address these concerns, the Structured Public Involvement (SPI) framework has been devised (Bailey et al. 2002). SPI is aimed at increasing stakeholder satisfaction with planning and design processes for public infrastructure. It uses a carefully selected combination of advanced methods including an electronic polling system, 3D visualization and Geographic Information Systems to increase public participation in decisions that affect their neighborhoods and communities.

SPI improves decision making by:

Integrating advanced methods more effectively
Gathering more input from a wider range of stakeholder groups
Providing clearer guidance for engineers, designers, planners and architects
Building “civic capacity,” or willingness to participate, for future decisions

To avoid misconceptions about SPI and what it can and cannot do, it is useful to consider how it works. SPI is not a checklist of options or practices to be followed in a strictly predetermined sequence that guarantees these desirable outcomes in every case. Nor is SPI a marketing tool designed to convince the public that one preferred or predesigned alternative is better than other possibilities. Designers, planners and engineers must be ready to cede part of the design domain to the other stakeholders. This does not mean their expertise is not necessary or valued, but that it cannot be imposed by main force, or sleight of thought, on the public if genuine alternatives exist.

SPI is a structured method for integrating appropriate and useful technologies into an advanced decision support system. To design an SPI protocol, it is necessary to work with interested parties to consider the decision system as a whole. This entails legal and practical questions that require the input of a variety of officials and other groups. It entails iterative and broad-based public hearings and focus group meetings. And finally, it entails consideration of the appropriate technologies and their uses and properties.

Here are the key questions that can be used to shape a specific SPI application:

What is the decision envelope? i.e what construction regulations, zoning or other legal factors control the decision? Related to this concern, how much input do stakeholders have? While there are clear legal requirements, for example in highway improvement the design must conform to standards listed in the AASHTO Green Book (1995) for highway engineers, these standards often allow for considerable design latitude. SPI takes advantage of this latitude by encouraging stakeholder input to determine what is preferred subject to these constraints.
What groups can participate? How can their expertise be recognized? It is very important to avoid imposing a planner’s vocabulary, or engineer’s terms, on publics that do not understand these words, and are not willing to be talked down to. The highway safety engineer’s “level of service” terminology, for example, is poorly if at all understood in public forums. Rather than attempting to educate the public, who have little time and less patience for what they see as professional pedantry, highway visualizations can overcome this language barrier by showing graphically the potential “level of service” in an easily comprehensible way.
How should input be gathered? Which technologies are most suitable? If GIS is to be used, is it cost effective in this case? Moreover can it be used to solicit input rather than showing people what has already been decided? This requires working to develop an analytic framework that gives designers maximum information from the stakeholder input.

Given these considerations, and others, appropriate technologies must be selected and a way of using them to solicit stakeholder input must be defined. TRB, EPA and FHWA, among other agencies, have identified a wide range of methods for public involvement and outreach. However these resources do not specify how the methods can be integrated effectively into a multistakeholder decision system. This is a job for the involved parties who in collaboration can develop an SPI application.

EP-AMIS
To gather stakeholder data about highway valuations it is necessary for the research team to work with the appropriate authority – in this case, the State Highway Agency that is legally charged with responsibility for the construction of new public roads (ISTEA 1991). Involved parties should be chosen with respect to the candidate corridor. In the test case these included a range of involved public officials at local governmental level; private organizations such as neighborhood groups; recreational and sports enthusiasts who used areas of the National Forest. In accord with the principle of Distributed Outreach (Bailey et. al. 2003), group meetings should be arranged at local community facilities, for example at local SHA offices, or District Offices, or schools and other public locations, and at times that suit the schedule of the population involved. For example in a project involving a low-income minority neighborhood in Louisville, KY, these meetings were scheduled in the early evenings in collaboration with a local residents’ organization so that shift workers and commuters could participate (Grossardt and Bailey 2003).

The meeting should be structured such that it does not waste participants’ time. For EP-AMIS value solicitation, at the test meeting held at District Headquarters for the SHA, two hours was budgeted. Two computers with large LCD projectors were set up allowing all participants a clear view of the proceedings. One computer was used to display a Powerpoint presentation. The AMIS methodology was explained by a trained facilitator and samples of the in-house test output were shown to familiarize participants with the system. The second projector was used to display the output of the SharpeDecisions® electronic polling system. This was used to gather input rapidly, anonymously and fairly. This system consists of a radio-frequency base station, a set of radio-frequency keypads and the SharpeDecisions® software. A Likert 1 through 10 point integer scale was used for each factor. A factor was presented and each participant recorded one vote. If the input key was pressed again before the vote ended, the second vote overwrote the first. After all votes were tallied on the projector screen, the summary was shown to participants including the mean and standard deviation for the group’s scores. A brief discussion was held and then the next factor was presented and the process was repeated. In this way over 50 elements were scored in less than an hour.

Figure 3: Flow chart of SPI protocol for EP-AMIS system

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