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Highway corridor alignment presents a highly complex decision environment in which a variety of social, environmental, and economic factors must be defined and weighted and trade-offs must be evaluated. These data vary widely in format and quality. Stakeholders from various groups, often with competing interests, should be integrated into this process efficiently to determine objectives, to select data, and then to quantify the importance. Corridor planning is therefore an appropriate domain for the development and application of enhanced methodologies that conjoin multicriteria decision-support techniques with the spatial analytic and presentation capacities of a geographic information system. The analytic minimum impedance surface (AMIS) methodology is presented, and its application to a case study in the southeastern United States is evaluated. AMIS features the structured integration of stakeholder input into a hybrid analytic hierarchy process. The advantages of the approach are highlighted, along with the significance of process design in building an effective methodology. Several potential applications are discussed. Conceptual constraints and problems related to the implementation of AMIS are set forth, and future enhancements are posited.

Public involvement in transportation planning and design has a problematic history. Professionals lack access to a coherent, organized method for communicating with the public, and some important principles of public involvement known to community design professionals are still being discovered by transportation professionals. A protocol, structured public involvement (SPI), is proposed. SPI was designed to ensure that public involvement is meaningful to the professional and the public. Principles of SPI are presented, and a series of steps useful for engaging the general public in a complex design or planning problem is given. SPI is intended to be transparent, accountable, democratic, and efficient. SPI places the use of technology within a public involvement framework built on community design experience. While technology can be useful, it must be placed in a social context. That is, various technologies are used because they can address such problems as lack of access to information, inconvenient and time-consuming meetings, confusing terms and graphics, and one-way communication. Highlights and examples are drawn from practical experience, where SPI protocols have been designed and used to solve problems of route planning, highway design, and transit-oriented development. While each problem set called for a different mix of technical tools, the protocol within which those tools were used was the same, with similar encouraging results. With SPI, public participation is less contentious and more informed, and the professional has information of high quality with which to begin the design process.

The authors have measured an Arnstein gap, that is, a significant difference between desired and actual levels of citizen participation in planning processes. This Arnstein gap exists because even well-intentioned professionals have an unrealistic expectation of achieving consensus across large planning scales. Further, it is often hoped or believed that technologies of representation will somehow accomplish consensus. The authors argue this is not possible without developing a stronger theoretical framework for their deployment in planning in democratic societies. The purpose of this research is to move the public closer to the center of the public infrastructure planning and design process in a productive, efficient, and more satisfactory manner, that is, to close the Arnstein gap. The authors adapt a participatory framework, called structured public involvement (SPI), for integrating visualization and geospatial technologies into large-scale public involvement in planning domains. The authors discuss how SPI using the casewise visual evaluation method is applied in collaboration with planners. A case study is presented of integrated transportation and land-use planning for an Indiana city. The results demonstrate that SPI achieves high levels of stakeholder satisfaction in addition to providing high-quality planning and design guidance for professionals.

Public involvement in transportation infrastructure decision making is frequently mandated and is regarded as increasingly essential by a wide variety of stakeholders. The integration of advanced technologies, such as visualization, into this process is increasingly desired. However, public involvement processes often are regarded as problematic by many stakeholders and the state highway agencies charged with implementing them. Structured public involvement (SPI) is posited. SPI takes a systems approach toward the integration of advanced technologies into public involvement forums. Because the goal of public involvement is to increase user satisfaction with both the process and the outcomes, the characteristics of advanced technologies and their capacities for gathering useful feedback in public forums must be evaluated. Visualization is put forth as an enabling technology within an SPI framework. The properties, capacities, and transportation-related uses of three visualization modes are evaluated, and their operational features are discussed. A case study dealing with highway improvement in central Kentucky reveals that three-dimensional renderings are significantly preferred to twodimensional and virtual reality modes; the case study also shows that visualization should complement, not replace, other performance information. The role of electronic scoring as an integral component of this SPI protocol is emphasized, resulting in fast assessment and free expression of views. Factors affecting the efficiency of visualization are analyzed, and recommendations are presented for implementing SPI protocols that rely on visualization. These include investigating participants' previous experience with visualization, incorporating iterative public involvement in finalizing design options, and ensuring that the technologies are compatible with the chosen public involvement process.

Subject to engineering constraints, bridges should present a pleasing visual aspect to their user communities. The research team extended its structured public involvement (SPI) protocol using casewise visual evaluation (CAVE) to the field of context-sensitive large-scale bridge design. The context-sensitive design process was used for Section 2 of the Louisville Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges project. Key design parameters including bridge type, height, symmetry, complexity, and tunnel effect (superstructure shape) were identified by bridge designers. During a 3-month period, an SPI protocol was used to determine community preferences from Kentucky and Indiana participants. Group preferences were gathered rapidly, anonymously, and fairly from a focus group by using electronic polling technology to evaluate potential designs. A preference model was built by using CAVE, and a range of nonlinear preference variations relative to the design parameters was investigated. The favorable public evaluation results of the SPI process using CAVE are presented, and the reasons for its high performance are discussed. Emphasis is placed on the need for a close collaboration between bridge designers and public involvement specialists. The project demonstrates how an analytic approach to public involvement that integrates technology into the dialogic relationship between designers and the public allows for the achievement of inclusive, successful context-sensitive design even for large, complex infrastructure projects.

Environmental justice (EJ), in the form of distributional justice, is mandated by a 1994 Executive Order. However, EJ is not easily achieved. EJ research can be divided into identification and mitigation strategies. EJ mitigation strategies intersect with public involvement, which in transportation has a long, and often controversial, history. This paper examines how a philosophy based on John Rawls’ theories of procedural justice and access to justice can address the need to achieve distributional justice. To improve procedural justice, the authors examine how effective large-group processes can deliver high-performance public involvement. Methodological barriers and the role of technologies such as electronic polling and visualization are discussed. The authors propose four process metrics for public involvement. On the basis of data on structured public involvement projects, the authors argue that such processes enhance procedural justice and thereby address specific EJ aims. These data illustrate that realizing this potential improvement will require a philosophical shift to a higher Arnstein ladder level, the identification and use of appropriate methodologies for involving large groups, and the integration of their valuations into effective decision support systems.

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