Lessons Learned

Based on the information given to the study team at all of the dialogue sessions, there were some approaches and practices that are helpful to remember as planning is begun for transportation projects or any other activities that desire public input. Below are some of the “lessons” gleaned from the comments made by the community members as well as the agency representatives who were gracious enough to participate in the sessions.

Communications

A number of the lessons learned had to do with communication.

• Face-to-face communication is the best.
• Find ways to get information to people without their having to attend a meeting, i.e., newsletters, flyers, bulletins, and media interviews.
• People need to see what direct benefits they will get from a transportation project. This may be hard sometimes since transportation projects tend to take a long time to complete and people lose faith since they do not see anything soon.
• Use language your audience can understand. This may require “translation” from “transportationese” to laymen’s terms and/or a language other than English. Having a non-technical person review materials may be helpful in this regard.

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Outreach

• It may be necessary to do some door-to-door visits to get people to come to a meeting.
• Get trusted leaders in the community to invite them to come to the meetings.
• Understand that sometimes the community wants you to come to them instead of expecting them to always come to you [your meetings].
• Use as many different means of outreach as possible.
• Let people know what to expect from the meeting and why they should attend.

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Attitude and Process

• Some people should not be allowed to work with the community because their attitude is not appropriate, either because they are condescending or unwilling to accept the opinions of community members. They may be able to work in one community, but not another or with some groups and not others.
• You are not going to get everyone involved.
• Work with the people who attend and acknowledge their interest in the process and the project(s).
• Numbers are not everything. If you have a small group of interested people you can often get significant input and feedback from them that you would not be able to get from a large crowd.
• There needs to be a compelling reason for people to get involved in the planning process.
• A successful meeting is one in which the community feels its input was valued and they can see the outcome of it.
• Do not ask for input and feedback if all the decisions are already made. Be clear what is up for decision and what is not.
• It may be helpful to have people known to and trusted by the community to co-host the meeting and participate in the planning of it.

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Resources

• Agencies need to work together to make the resources go further.
• There are numerous opportunities to collaborate on getting information to the community and doing outreach when agencies make a conscious effort to work together.
• Agencies need to communicate clearly what they have as tools and resources that can be used by other agencies and the community to get more people involved.

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Knowing the System

• The community needs to understand that the planners are not the final decision-makers.
• Be clear what the process is for getting to the end and where the influence points are: how and where they can make their wishes known to the decision-makers.
• People need to understand that the system is not always responsive to their needs. Decision-makers have to make trade-offs.
• Community members have definite opinions about elected officials, what they can expect from them and what influences them.
• There is a great deal of distrust of elected officials and cynicism about the process in the community.

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