Community Engagement in Transport Planning webinar review

If you missed the 13^th of July webinar “Community Engagement in Transport Planning”, you can still watch it online on the ICE website here.

The event had four excellent speakers who talked about their views, experiences and innovative ideas in engaging with communities for transport planning schemes.

Dan Philips opened the seminar with a presentation that contained his innovative ideas for community engagement for urban and transport planning and quality visual graphics of his experience and theories he developed whilst working as a Senior Research Fellow in the Intelligent Mobility Design Centre, Royal College of Arts. This included the theory of  identifying leverage points in the planning process where small items can be used to leverage large issues such as sustainability. A key message from Dan is that winning the hearts and minds of a community is not simply about ‘engagement’ but participation and not approaching our communities with answers, but with questions.

Elizabeth Barner, Transport Planner at WSP, spoke about her experience using focus groups in public consultation. Examples she gave were from her experience in engaging with hard to reach groups in the community and encouraging them to participate. A key message was that many people do not have much time to spare to spend on engagement and that a lot of respondents are ones already engaged with strong views about a scheme, rather than those with moderate views. Targeted focus groups can overcome some bias issues but you need to work hard to ensure engagement times, locations and duration are convenient for all participants, not just for us as transport planners.

Lucy Bush from BritainThinks and Garry Palmer, Lead Commissioner for Transport Strategy and Policy Warwickshire County Council, gave a joint presentation on an engagement project they undertook in Warwickshire. The focus of their presentation was on community engagement for developing a new Local Transport Plan (LTP) for Warwickshire. BritainThinks developed a ‘Citizen’s Panel’ consisting of a comprehensive representation of the population of Warwickshire to engage with. A key lesson learnt was not to write a draft LTP and ask for community comments but to develop the LTP alongside community engagement.