Using Performance Measures to Strengthen Public Involvement in Identifying Targeted Transportation Investments

Abstract

An underreported element of performance-based planning is the use of performance measures to increase stakeholder involvement. This paper describes a corridor planning effort using FHWA’s PlanWorks decision-support tool in which selection of performance measures was used to engage community members and to create solutions for a highway corridor that had the backing of citizens and elected officials. At three discrete phases—setting the project scope, establishing measures, and identifying candidate solution sets—the number of performance measures decreased from 23 to 13 to four. Measures that initially seemed promising were discarded because of a lack of data, duplication of other metrics, and an inability to discriminate among alternatives, leaving measures without such drawbacks. Public support for solutions for the corridor in question was enhanced by relating performance measures directly to the goals of participants in the planning process (where goals followed from participants’ location-specific comments), asking participants midway through the process if their views were being heard, and selecting measures that directly related to project funding opportunities. After this process, a corridor that had been studied five times over two decades with no resolution of issues had a set of tangible, financially feasible candidate improvement projects supported by both the community and local government officials. Although refinements to this process are feasible—for example, tailor it to specific populations of interest and assess the public’s satisfaction—this paper demonstrates one approach to developing a set of small-scale improvements that partially satisfy diverse constituencies, resulting in a package of improvements that are ready for implementation.