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How can a solid community engagement plan help a government engage more than 45,000 participants in discussing a transportation issue? The Secretariat of Citizen Participation and Planning of the State of Jalisco, Mexico boiled it down to three elements:
- Creating an inclusive participation methodology
- Involving a wide range of stakeholders and municipal actors
- Using Maptionnaire — their digital community engagement platform of choice
This community engagement project gave the government a wealth of information for preparing a multidimensional solution to the transportation problems around López Mateos Avenue. Let’s unpack the community engagement plan used in Jalisco and how it enabled the administration to engage so many people in one project.
Collaborative Solutions for a Complex Transportation Issue
López Mateos Avenue spans three metropolitan municipalities from Jalisco's state capital, Guadalajara, to the southern entrance of the state -- which is also a gateway to one of the most important commercial ports in the country. The 21-mile (34 km) avenue is a part of the daily commute for around 131,000 people (most of whom use private cars), not to mention multiple freight vehicles that ply between the port and the city.
No wonder that López Mateos, an important commercial route constantly packed with traffic, also attracted political attention. A suggestion has been made to expand the avenue by building another level above the existing route — a populist action that would not alleviate congestion and is not economically, environmentally, nor socially sustainable.
The Secretariat of Citizen Participation and Planning of the State was assigned to find a more viable and sustainable solution to the avenue problem than the one that was rumored about. And the team didn’t start with single-handedly throwing bold ideas onto the table: they prioritized collaboration with other teams from the affected municipalities, as well as institutes and other public and private organizations. Together, they worked on creating an engagement methodology, implementing participatory activities, and drafting solutions based on the received feedback.
In this project, community engagement became the core of the decision-making process. It was crucial to understand the reality of this avenue — how residents, communities, and stakeholders experience López Mateos and what they think about it — before even drafting potential solutions.
Inclusive Multimodal Community Engagement Plan
To create this wide dialogue with as many people as possible, Jalisco designed a thorough engagement plan. The engagement phase lasted for several months and included five modes of participation. In the first mode, people could submit research, technical proposals, guidelines, or any existing document, contributing to the Non-Participative Observing Research.
After that, the other four modes were opened up, enabling people from all walks of life to share their ideas and experiences. People essentially answered the same questions — but they had different opportunities to participate.
Participating via Maptionnaire, online community engagement platform
The Secretariat team created a map-based survey where residents answered a series of questions about their experiences with the avenue, how they use it, and what improvements they suggest. In the end, most of the residents participated via Maptionnaire because they could fill in the survey from their own devices at any time, without the need to travel for a meeting — just one of the many benefits of using digital map-based engagement in transportation planning.
Answering the quick survey at the stoplights
Road Safety police surveyed drivers at 32 stop lights along the avenue. They used a simple checkbox questionnaire, identifying the type of vehicle, how many people are inside, where they are heading, and why. Respondents could also propose an intervention to improve the avenue, which a police officer would take note of.
Attending assemblies
Locals and stakeholders attended dialogue tables where they discussed López Mateos and brought up suggestions. It was crucial to organize these dialogues for all the stakeholders, including police workers, schools and universities along the avenue, transportation organizations, NGOs, and developers.
Answering a survey in-person
The municipal departments in charge of community engagement, in collaboration with the Institute of Statistical and Geographical Information, had people on their teams visit a randomized sample of homes in 200 neighborhoods and ask questions about the avenue.
This versatility of engagement methods ensured that residents and stakeholders of distinct profiles were engaged in the process. Because not everyone can come to an in-person assembly and not everyone who experienced the avenue used the car. However, the questions residents answered were the same throughout all modes, whether digital or analog. This way, the community engagement team received the information in more or less the same format, making it easier to work with the data.
What’s more, the team organizing public engagement also carefully planned out the engagement strategy to ensure that people would know about these activities and understand how they can impact the project. The QR codes to the Maptionnaire survey appeared on multiple banners in malls and other places of interest. The team also actively participated in public talks and interviews, spreading the news about the engagement opportunities. The map-based survey was also promoted on social media and in a local newspaper.
Maptionnaire as a Community Engagement Platform of Choice
Maptionnaire is an ideal fit for the needs of this project — the digital platform made it easy to engage thousands of people with custom-made interactive map-based surveys. Altogether, over 35,000 people completed the Maptionnaire survey, and this number speaks for itself.
Since the project is about people’s mobility and interactions with the environment, it is crucial to collect the information about specific locations. With Maptionnaire, all the data comes in a GIS-compatible, location-based format. The service comes with onboarding and extensive support, so all the users within the organization get a chance to try the platform out.
I was really excited about using the platform because of how you can organize the information and you can use the filters.
Celia Andrea Ramirez Arechiga, the Secretariat of Citizen Participation and Planning, State of Jalisco
What has especially impressed the Secretariat of Citizen Participation and Planning is the opportunity to filter the obtained data on Maptionnaire Platform itself. They could investigate how the answer differs for various demographics and create heatmaps, graphs, and map-based visualizations of different data. These features also made it easy to create weekly reports on how the data collection with Maptionnaire is progressing and present them to stakeholders.
Over 45000 Engaged Residents and Stakeholders
The thorough community engagement plan and a combination of digital and in-person, synchronous and asynchronous engagement opportunities resulted in 46,124 people engaging in the process and sharing their experiences and ideas with the government. Altogether, over 58,000 people got interested in the process (if you count also those who started the survey but didn’t finish it).
There was a lot of diversity in participation, especially when it comes to age. Maptionnaire helped the government to reach the younger and more tech-savvy community members, while more traditional door-to-door and stop light surveys brought additional demographics on board.
Also, it was mainly men (59%) who answered the survey online, while the 53% of the respondents of door-to-door questionnaires identified themselves as women. But it doesn’t mean that digital engagement is less suitable for a specific gender: it depends a lot on the context and gendered roles common in a specific community. For example, in Kosovo, Maptionnaire created a whole new opportunity for women to participate digitally and influence their built environment, while it was mainly men who dominated in-person community meetings. Importantly, the participation methods should be diverse and localized to attract as diverse a population as possible.
Information Obtained through Community Engagement
Overall, multimodal community engagement helped Jalisco to understand how different people move through the avenue and why.
“Why haven’t you thought about changing transportation?” This question brought a lot of insights for planners: some residents (especially those in a door-to-door survey) didn't even know that other forms of transportation were available other than a private car. Other answers included public transport being inconvenient or stops being located too far away from their destination. These learnings opened an opportunity for planners to make public transportation options more accessible and, importantly, visible for locals, as well as enhance the outreach about these travel modes.
In most cases, there was only one person in a car, also among those traveling to work. This data immediately sparked an idea to work with enterprises situated along the avenue on setting up employee transportation or carpooling programs.
Another problem that was commonly pointed out by commuters is the high number of traffic accidents and congestion caused due to them. Therefore, a set of measures was drafted to increase traffic safety, and a new system for handling traffic accidents was proposed.
Especially with the help of the Maptionnaire Platform, the planning team gained crucial information about the journeys, including the modality, starting point, destination point, and where locals change the mode of transport. This data is location-based and easy to map out and export to other software. For example, this information directly feeds into the proposal for expanding the public transportation network.
The Challenges of Engaging Residents
While the community engagement activities in Jalisco were extremely successful in their quality and outreach, there were still some challenges that the Secretariat of Citizen Participation and its partners had to overcome.
Locals were not used to collaborating with the government on similar projects. So the planners had to, first of all, increase the trustworthiness of the campaign and, secondly, explain why local opinions matter. For instance, in all of their outreach activities they had to emphasize that the consultation was not about a decision that has already been made. On the contrary, its purpose was to learn what experiences and ideas community members have, and experts would use local knowledge and suggestions for making a proposal.
Another difficulty stemmed from the fact that a lot of regional, municipal, and state authorities were interested in the project. The Secretariat worked hard to involve all these different stakeholders in the consultation process. And in the end it paid off: it made the adoption of the proposals easier since the process was already known to multiple governmental stakeholders.
The Proposal Based on Residents' Experiences
It was clear from the start that López Mateos didn't pose only a transportation problem — it is a multidimensional challenge for all communities involved, and it requires interdisciplinary solutions. The experiences and ideas from residents validated this approach and provided more depth and insights on which the proposal is based. All of the results were thoroughly reviewed by the technical teams of several Secretariats such as Public Work, Transportation, Security, Education, Economic Development and the Metropolitan Institute of Planning and Development Managing with the Governor himself across several team meetings to ensure the intervention responded as a whole and not as individual solutions.
The proposal consists of six components since no single intervention would address the multiplicity of challenges and factors. Here they are:
- Expanding the public transport network, improving interconnectivity and frequency, and introducing alternate public transport routes
- Extending the subway line by 9 stations to offer an alternative travel option
- Introducing better traffic management and urban acupuncture (modules for traffic police along the route, better signage, improved safety, better crossings, safer cycling roads)
- Enhancing legal enforcement
- Improving planning and territorial ordering (e.g., not allowing for development without ensuring sufficient public transportation)
- Promoting sustainable road culture and new ways of thinking about moving around (e.g., car-sharing, public transport)
Another crucial result of such an extensive engagement program is the forging of shared responsibility for the problem and, importantly, for finding a solution to it. The engagement activities, strategic outreach, and regular feedback loops to locals and stakeholders ensured a sense of collaboration among them.
We’re excited about Maptionnaire, already thinking about our second process with this platform.
Celia Andrea Ramirez Arechiga, the Secretariat of Citizen Participation and Planning, State of Jalisco
The Secretariat of Citizen Participation and Planning of the State of Jalisco is happy with the results of this community engagement project – it not only provided insights for this particular project but also strengthened the local community as such. Maptionnaire will also be used on their next project with a similar multimodal methodology that aims to benchmark participation opportunities available to the residents of 125 municipalities. Before Maptionnaire, the Secretariat didn’t have a chance to simultaneously engage all these municipalities with thousands of residents — and now they can.
Takeaways for Creating a Community Engagement Plan
- The problem that Jalisco faced wasn’t just one avenue — it was a community problem affecting three municipalities with thousands of residents.
- Only a combination of collaborative and inclusive solutions could mitigate the problem in a way that’s beneficial for the community and the environment.
- To create this set of solutions, the Secretariat of Citizen Participation set up a community engagement project, inviting residents and stakeholders to share their experiences and ideas.
- Maptionnaire was a key platform for reaching out to multiple people (over 45,000 participants in total) and obtaining GIS-based data implemented in the solution. The digital format and easy-to-use interface made participation more accessible and effortless for residents. It granted equal access to participation activities because not everyone has enough time or social capital to participate in in-person meetings.
- Inviting residents and stakeholders early in the planning process promoted a sense of shared responsibility for the problem and ensured that a collaborative multi-sector solution was proposed.
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