The timing couldn’t be better: virtual public involvement was the Every Day Counts Program’s innovation of the month for March. Tools for information sharing and public involvement include telephone town halls, online meetings, crowdsourcing, and online ads.
Online ads, often informing the public about a survey, meeting, plan, or project, are a popular and cost-effective way to encourage engagement on matters of public concern. Agencies can choose from a wide array of social media ads and promoted posts, as well as internet search and display ads that appear on websites or in mobile apps.
The highly targetable nature of online ads allows agencies to access hard-to-reach communities or demographic groups, which provides diverse points of view from those who have never participated in public engagement in the past. These ads can target geographic locations (called geo-targeting or geo-fencing) or demographic groups, to strategically expand public awareness in the transportation planning process. Online ads are often paired with print, radio, or television ads, and with other types of information dissemination as part of an overall communications campaign.
For crowdsourcing, three common mechanisms include data extracted from social media platforms, data acquired from third-party crowdsource providers, and data collected from specially developed mobile apps. These data can be passively or actively transmitted and may be quantitative or qualitative in nature. Information may be related to speed, travel time, incident type, travel behavior, public sentiment, vehicular operation, and more.
Crowdsourced data can help agencies quickly identify the impact of demand changes on transportation system performance and efficiently adapt traffic management systems to improve travel. For example, in response to COVID-19 closures in Illinois, the Lake County Department of Transportation (LCDOT) analyzed its advanced traffic signal performance measure (ATSPM) demand data with its free crowdsourced corridor travel time data.
LCDOT defined and implemented systemwide changes to all LCDOT-owned traffic signals within two days of state COVID-19 mandates taking effect. The agency is coordinating with the Illinois DOT to modify the timing on state signals in its region and continuing to monitor evolving traffic demand and performance.
(Adapted from EDC News.)
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