Best of 2020: Stop Asking the Public What They Want
What does it mean that Americans obsess over national politics—which in 2020 were as toxic, vapid, and disconnected from the real needs of real people as I've seen in my lifetime—while very few engage meaningfully with local politics, where they would have far more ability to improve their own lives by getting involved?
Part of it, no doubt, is the relentless churn of social media and the always-on news cycle. But I think a less appreciated part of it is that people are alienated from local politics because local decision-making processes might as well have been designed to be as alienating and inscrutable as possible. People can't find the entry point, even if they would like to have a voice. And to the extent that citizens do have an effective voice, it's usually a small handful of loud activists with a lot of time on their hands, an encyclopedic knowledge of the finer points of the zoning code, and a black belt in Robert's Rules of Order.
At the same time, there's a populist response to that—“Communities should hold more power, and arrogant, elitist so-called experts should have less!“—that has always rubbed me wrong. Some of that is likely defensiveness, since I have a degree in urban planning that I'd like to think is worth something. Some of it is that I know that if we put aspects of my own city's transportation, housing, and development policy to a vote, the likely results would worsen our most pressing problems. The opinions of individuals on how to handle things like traffic congestion are often heavily informed by anecdotal experience and misguided conventional wisdom. Simply getting better at asking the public what they want is no answer.
My writings on the subject are my attempt to square that cognitive dissonance. The lightbulb moment for me was reading Ruben Anderson's 2018 essay, “Most Public Engagement is Worse Than Worthless.” In it, Ruben makes a simple but brilliant observation: What we do wrong, 9 times out of 10, is we ask laypeople to advise technical experts on the matters in which the experts are expert, instead of on the matters in which the public is actually expert. And then we, predictably, disregard the input, leaving everyone frustrated and alienated by the whole thing.
If your city constantly insists that it wants your input, and yet you feel disrespected and disempowered by what you actually see happening around you, the below piece is for you. It's an exploration of what we, the “experts,” get wrong when we simply ask the public what they want us to do. And what we should be doing instead if we truly want to engage—meaning not to invite the communities we serve to take a seat at our table on our terms, but to go humbly have a seat at theirs. — Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor
It's no secret that a lot of public engagement is worthless—or worse. It's not just that much of it is lazily designed to check off a box on a list of requirements—though that's true. It's not just that there's a built-in power imbalance, in which public feedback tends to overrepresent groups with a lot of access to and familiarity with the political process—older, wealthier, whiter, and more politically engaged residents. Though that's true too.
As Ruben Anderson writes in "Most Public Engagement is Worse Than Worthless," there's a more fundamental problem with the way local governments tend to solicit public input, even when they do sincerely want the input and want it to be representative and inclusive.
That problem has to do with expertise. We ask members of the public to be experts in things they are not. At the same time, we don't tap into the very valid forms of expertise they do have. The result undermines trust in the planning process.
As a rule, your average Joe Citizen is an expert in the ways they use and experience the public realm. Residents can easily and meaningfully answer questions like these:
Where is it scary to walk or dangerous to cross the street?
Where is there insufficient lighting at night?
What recreational opportunities do you wish you didn't have to leave your neighborhood for?
What is the thing you would be most excited to show an out-of-town visitor about your neighborhood?
What is the thing you would be most ashamed to show them?
As a rule, your average Joe Citizen is not an expert in the design or economics of the built environment. Residents who aren’t built-environment professionals are not well suited to answering questions like these:
Does this street require an additional travel lane?
Should the travel lanes be 10 or 12 feet wide?
Has a sufficient amount of affordable housing been built in our community in the past few years?
Would a grocery store likely succeed if it opened at this intersection?
Does the proposed apartment complex have enough parking?
And yet we often ask the public to weigh in on questions like those on the bottom list. When we don't do it explicitly, we do it implicitly, by asking them to rank choices or express opinions that, if one is to provide a truly informed answer, requires knowledge of the sort that planners, architects, and engineers go to school to obtain.
It is highly counterproductive to ask the public the wrong sorts of questions. Not only will it fail to teach planners anything they didn’t know, it’s ultimately insulting to the public being “consulted,” because people can tell when their participation in a process is a formality or a sideshow.
The real function of this kind of engagement, I suspect, is to serve as some combination of political barometer and PR tool. It can either provide cover (and talking points) for elected officials to approve the thing a critical set of power brokers already decided they want to do, or it can produce a clear indication that the thing they want to do is so unpopular it should be abandoned or rethought. The same applies to formal public hearings; their real function is to gauge the relative strength of political support / opposition, not to solicit useful citizen input.
A Survey that Asks the Wrong Questions
I recently took a survey that illustrates some of these problems. Created by the Florida Department of Transportation, the survey regards the design of Fruitville Road, a major arterial stroad in my community of Sarasota—in fact, the primary travel corridor between our downtown and the freeway.
The survey begins with an open-ended vision question: "How would you describe your ideal Fruitville Road?"
This is at least an interesting question in that it gets at values and aspirations. But ultimately, it's not clear to me how the results will be at all actionable, except to aggregate answers that are similar according to some criterion and claim something like "x% of the public said [insert priority here] was important to them."
The author’s response to the “Vision” question. (Click to view larger)
If you’re a transportation planner, there is roughly zero chance this activity will lead you to some deep design insight that hadn’t occurred to you, or to a radical shift in priorities (unless your starting ones were very off base). This kind of survey doesn't tell us what to do; it tells us how to do the PR for the thing we're going to do. It tells planning staff what to emphasize in the PowerPoint slides for the public hearing.
I gave an answer that probably outs me as an urban planner, or at least an urbanist familiar with the lingo (like "calmed traffic" and "streetscape") of a certain advocacy community. I wrote it this way because I know who my audience is, and I know they'll know what I mean. I'm guessing my answer to this question is unusual, both in its substance and the way it's written.
The next section of the survey asks us to "Rank the Concepts." Planners have developed four conceptual visions for how they might redesign Fruitville Road, ostensibly based on an earlier round of public input. The survey depicts each concept using Streetmix, a popular free tool to create a simple cross-section infographic that illustrates how the space on a particular roadway is used.
I can see the logic by which this might reflect good public engagement practice: first ask the public about their values. Then apply your expert judgment and design chops to come up with designs that implement those values—since the public isn’t qualified to do the design part. Then show the public your designs and ask them what they think.
This part in practice, though, is a perfect illustration of the expertise problem.
Should Fruitville have a multi-use path? Should it have wider sidewalks? Median landscaping?
Your average survey respondent is unlikely to understand the nuanced design implications and trade-offs here. The most they can offer is a gut reaction, which is as likely to be a reaction to words and phrases that connote something to them (for example, what are your feelings on "redevelopment"?) as to the actual illustrated concept. To ask people to look at a Streetmix cross-section and accurately imagine themselves using the road, let alone envision occasional situations that might affect their safety, comfort, or otherwise their experience, is an incredibly tall order.
My comments reflect things I know because of what I've studied and what I've spent a lot of time reading about. I have an opinion on back-of-curb sidewalks; how many of my neighbors do? (What they likely have is personal experiences with back-of-curb sidewalks, but outside of a context that really brings those experiences to mind, it's unlikely they'd chime in about them here.)
Click to view larger
Things don’t get a whole lot better in the next section, "Focus Areas." In theory, these questions, which focus in on specific stretches of the roadway, should be an opportunity to identify people's nuanced local knowledge of Fruitville. But the opportunity is largely wasted with the likes of this question: "Would you like to see changes to the signal timing at Tuttle or Lockwood Ridge?"
Um, well, I was stuck at that light last week while running late for work and it stressed me out, so... sure?
This makes about as much sense as asking a bunch of teenagers whether their town’s downtown needs more parking.
What Is a Survey Like This For?
This survey is part of a multi-part corridor study from something called the FDOT Planning Studio, described as follows:
The Planning Studio is an innovative, new department at FDOT, that started in District One. The Planning Studio will have the first look at state roadways to help determine what improvements are necessary and needed, based on input from local government planners and the public. The Planning Studio is building relationships with transportation users, local governments, residents, business owners, and stakeholders in the area and collaborating with them to ensure that FDOT is improving roadways in a way that is consistent with the local vision.
All the public engagement buzzwords are here—stakeholders, collaborating, vision—and who wouldn’t want the roadway to be “consistent with the local vision” if the alternative is inconsistent or oblivious? The question I have is twofold:
Is there such a thing as the local vision—what the Sarasota community collectively “wants” from Fruitville Road?
Is this process capable of ascertaining it if there is?
Results of the “four scenarios” ranking exercise, at the time the author completed the survey. (Click to view larger)
Consider the results of the scenario exercise, which are presented after you finish the survey. Because “Technology-Redevelopment” received the highest star rating at 3.92, can we now claim there is a public mandate for transit-oriented development with reduced parking, and/or for bus and autonomous-vehicle priority lanes, both of which were specified in that design? As a Sarasota resident who has watched the fate of other transportation plans, I am positive the actual implementation of such a project would receive some vocal support but also much strenuous opposition.
Because “Multi-Use Path” outscored “Expanded Sidewalks,” can we now claim there is a mandate for an off-road bike and pedestrian path?
Will local officials, having chosen one of these options or a hybrid, use the survey results to claim a public mandate for whatever their choice is. Probably. Will there still be loud dissenters at that point? Almost certainly.
At best, what’s been achieved here is a PR or educational effort, not the meaningful transmission of priorities from the bottom up.
Is that a bad thing? It’s worth asking, after all, in what way the “meaningful transmission of priorities from the bottom up” is even a relevant goal for a corridor plan for six miles of a major road. I don’t want to indulge the notion that there is a singular public vision for this road just waiting to be discovered, and that the problem is simply that this survey fails to discover it. The reality is that there isn’t one. The public consists of thousands of individuals with their own priorities, preferences, and experiences. And those individuals mostly experience a place like Fruitville Road in particular ways at particular moments, not in abstract “visions.”
And yet we ask them, in the abstract, about visions and priorities and preferences, and we aggregate the feedback and end up with something that doesn’t really illuminate what we ought to do.
As sociologist Jeremy Levine wrote for Shelterforce in “It’s Time to Move On From Community Consensus,” the notion that any public process will result in a clear mandate for a single course of action is an illusion. Levine offers a contrary idea of how public engagement might work in light of the impossibility of achieving a unified community vision:
What if… we invested more in low cost, ongoing exercises that produce a high volume of information, persist even after particular projects are completed, make priorities transparent, and neither seek nor assume a singular position from “the community”?
The “high volume of information” without a forced attempt to synthesize it into a vision—to take the lazy approach and ask the public, “So what do you want us to do?”—is key to doing public engagement better. Those responsible for the design of a road like Fruitville should be constantly evaluating how people use Fruitville and where they struggle: to drive it, to walk or bike it, to cross it, to patronize or run a business along it, to otherwise engage with it in a positive way. Much of this evaluation should take the form of direct observation, and direct interaction with the users of the road. (As much as possible, this should occur as they are using it, not after the fact and in theoretical terms.)
Ideally, we would then take these direct insights—into people’s behavior, not their stated preferences—and use them to do pilot projects. Lots of them. Conduct experiments with the likes of traffic cones, temporary bollards and paint, and see how people respond. Keep and scale up the ones that work.
If you do this, you can’t help but engage with the experiences of a broad cross-section of the public. There is no Sarasota resident that doesn't use this road at some point. The public has a wealth of extremely detailed and location-specific knowledge about their experiences with the road that planners would be foolish not to seek out.
Public priorities ranked in the results from the first round of this survey process. Note that there is a direct conflict between the top two ranked priorities, “Safety” and “Vehicle speed,” and this survey offers little guidance as to how road users will respond to efforts to resolve that trade-off. (Click to view larger)
At some point, there will still be a need for bigger-picture planning, not just one-off iterative projects. There's value in thinking holistically about a corridor like Fruitville from end to end. For example, many transportation improvements depend on network effects to be valuable: there is little use in implementing a disconnected 1/4 mile of a multi-use path here and 1/2 mile there, versus a continuous corridor.
But the discussion about that vision needs to be an ongoing thing with the community, not a survey or two. Those who would design the street should be out there, using it, talking with those who use it or collecting real-time information on how people are using it and what they're experiencing.
Ultimately, planning is political, and requires resolving competing interests. It should be a central goal of planning to ensure that the full range of community members’ interests, needs, and struggles are heard and given weight and consideration.
This kind of extremely common survey process, though, doesn’t give people’s struggles the weight they deserve. Instead, it’s focused on achieving the illusion of a “vision” that doesn’t really exist, based on questions the average citizen isn’t prepared to answer.
(Cover photo via Pikrepo. Creative Commons license.)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.