Agencies are usually comfortable with evaluating alternatives based on quantitative measures of capacity, safety, design standard compliance, plan compliance, and minimization of direct impacts to known natural resources. However, they are generally less comfortable with attempts to measure the effects of alternatives on issues such as “quality of life” or “community cohesion.” These are often viewed as intangible and, therefore, unmeasurable. However, if these are important issues to the stakeholders, they must be tackled head-on. Ignoring these just because they seem difficult to measure sends the wrong message to stakeholders that they are unimportant. Furthermore, there have been many successes in working with stakeholders to develop quantifiable evaluation criteria for such categories. When properly prompted, individuals with knowledge of the project area and pressing concerns about future development can usually pinpoint specific, measurable items that capture their concerns.
As part of identifying alternatives for improvements to an aging and unsafe segment of Interstate 83 near York, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania DOT conducted an extensive collaborative process with community stakeholders. In addition to creating a community advisory committee, project website, toll-free number, e-mail address, and newsletters, the core of the effort involved a week-long “community design center” process. Participants could recommend possible roadway alignments and other solutions and see them drawn on a large-screen CAD system while they watched. During the design sessions, project staff also presented background information on the environmental process and on traffic modeling, helping participants develop the same understanding as the project planners and designers. Eight alternatives resulted from the collaborative process. In a subsequent design center session, the alternatives were evaluated against engineering constraints, cost, the project needs statement, and environmental constraints using a GIS database, again allowing the participants to understand and participate in the alternative design and selection process.
While broad outreach techniques such as those mentioned above can be used to “reality-test” a set of evaluation criteria, small groups representing a cross section of stakeholder interests are best suited for initial development of the evaluation framework and specific criteria. Consultation could be conducted with an advisory group established for the project, an existing advisory group, or a series of special interest groups consulted on criteria associated with their particular issues of concern.
Source: NCHRP Report 480: A Guide to Best Practices for Achieving Context Sensitive Solutions pp.27-28
Published: 2002
