In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, community engagement experts at Franklin Associates are digitizing their community mapping process to reach a broader public and seamlessly integrate results into the transportation planning and design process.
Buckle up for this "tour" across Baton Rouge, where we'll discover two excellent examples of roadway planning projects. Along the way, James Taylor, AICP, Senior Planner at Franklin Associates, shares how GIS-compatible data from more community members has contributed to plans that fulfill public input requirements and reflect local needs.
Example 1: Community-driven corridor planning
What's the most seamless way to integrate public comments into a corridor design process? For the master planning of a Baton Rouge I-10 interstate freeway widening project, Franklin Associates used the Maptionnaire Community Engagement Platform.
But why did they go digital? A traditional community mapping workshop—you know, neighbors chatting around a paper map and placing stickers to suggest new crosswalks or bike lanes-–is a valuable activity, but with challenges and limitations. Live events require significant resources, but only a small number of community members tend to show up. Plus, community feedback isn't presentable until the team works for hours transcribing results into a digital format.
With Maptionnaire it was possible to replicate the common "sticky-dot" exercise. People were able to place dots representing lighting, parking, exercise areas, pedestrian crossings, and landscaping within the project area along the I-10 corridor.
James Taylor, AICP, Senior Planner at Franklin Associates
For an innovative approach to public input, Franklin Associates incorporated a digital map-based questionnaire, or maptionnaire, into their process. Participants could open up the maptionnaire—conveniently, whenever, wherever—and mark the digital map with their concerns and suggestions. The results? Clear, categorized, location-based public comments (all GIS-compatible) that directly supported the transportation planners and landscape architects. That highlights just a few of the many benefits of digital map-based engagement in transportation planning.
During the design process, the project team integrated data from public input with site conditions and other design requirements, ultimately delivering a successful, context-sensitive solution.
For similar success stories, check out the multi-modal corridor project that engaged over 45,000 people in Jalisco, Mexico and Perkins&Will's campus master plan for the University of Kansas, featuring a prominent campus corridor.
Example 2: Navigating NEPA public comments
Building a highway connection across the Mississippi River is no small task. The planning process, headed by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, required consultants to work with state and local lawmakers, federal stakeholders, and passionate residents, all within the not-so-simple National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) framework. But Franklin Associates did more than "survive" these challenges, they smartly channeled a flood of feedback into a clear and compelling understanding of local needs.
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Using the Maptionnaire Community Engagement Platform during the public comment phase, they collected well over a thousand digital, ready-to-analyze comments. The public input showed the overall bridge preferences among regional residents, and just a little bit of geospatial analysis of the results revealed something even more interesting...
We used the Maptionnaire responses to understand how people from one neighborhood feel a certain way about the project, while people who live in a different area feel differently about the project.
James Taylor, AICP, Senior Planner at Franklin Associates
In our free on-demand webinar, Inclusive Transportation Planning with Map-based Engagement, James dives into the full story of how they combined Maptionnaire with traditional methods to collect, analyze, and utilize community insights throughout the NEPA and transportation planning process.
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