Bridging the gap: Do community needs assessments enhance public participation in transportation planning?

Traditional avenues of public input in the transportation planning process require residents to have the time, knowledge, and capacity to participate. Those who don't - often lower-income and other disadvantaged groups - are left out. To encourage more broad-based participation, some states and localities have funded additional community-based, grassroots-organized transportation studies to explicitly engage with underrepresented populations. However, the effectiveness of such studies is an open question. This study analyzes the results of a pilot program in California to determine whether community studies, or community studies, include the disadvantaged groups they intended to include, and whether they offer additional benefits or costs compared to traditional public participation processes in transportation planning. The California Air Resources Board funded a series of community transportation needs assessments under the Clean Mobility Options pilot program that were intended to include historically underrepresented groups in identifying their transportation needs and potential solutions. We examine responses from those programs' resident surveys, community engagement strategies, and findings from the needs assessments' final reports, to identify factors that predict successful outreach. We also compare public participation methods in community needs assessments with those in long-range transportation plans. Although we are unable to ascertain whether the community studies led to any changes in local transportation systems, we do identify the conditions under which additional engagement encourages traditionally hard-to-reach communities to participate in transportation planning, as well as when it does not. We conclude this paper with recommendations for when additional studies can be useful, and alternative policies to address equity gaps in the transportation planning process.