This guide was written as a quick primer for transportation professionals and analysts who assess the impacts of proposed transportation actions on communities. It outlines the community impact assessment process, highlights critical areas that must be examined, identifies basic tools and information sources, and stimulates the thought-process related to individual projects. In the past, the consequences of transportation investments on communities have often been ignored or introduced near the end of a planning process, reducing them to reactive considerations at best. The goals of this primer are to increase awareness of the effects of transportation actions on the human environment and emphasize that community impacts deserve serious attention in project planning and development-attention comparable to that given the natural environment. Finally, this guide is intended to provide some tips for facilitating public involvement in the decision making process.

Internationally renowned facilitator and public participation consultant James L. Creighton offers a practical guide to designing and facilitating public participation of the public in environmental and public policy decision making. Written for government officials, public and community leaders, and professional facilitators, The Public Participation Handbook is a toolkit for designing a participation process, selecting techniques to encourage participation, facilitating successful public meetings, working with the media, and evaluating the program. The book is also filled with practical advice, checklists, worksheets, and illustrative examples.

The Charrette Handbook is a step-by-step guide to successful charrettes to help citizens envision new possibilities for their communities.

This book examines the key issues for consideration when evaluating information, consultation and public participation.

Transportation Planning and Public Participation: Theory, Process, and Practice explains why, and then how, transportation professionals can treat public participation as an opportunity to improve their projects and identify problems before they do real damage. Using fundamental principles based on extensive project-based research and insights drawn from multiple disciplines, the book helps readers re-think their expectations regarding the project process. It shows how public perspectives can be productively solicited, gathered, modeled, and integrated into the planning and design process, guides project designers on how to ask the proper questions and identify strategies, and demonstrates the tradeoffs of different techniques. Readers will find an analytic and evaluation framework - along with process design guidelines - that will help improve the usefulness and applicability of public input. - Shows how to apply quantifiable metrics to the public participation process - Helps readers critically analyze and identify project properties that impact public participation process decisions - Provides in-depth examples that demonstrate how feedback, representation, and decision modeling can be integrated to achieve outcomes - Demonstrates basic principles using examples from a wide range of types and scales - Presents tactics on how to make public meetings more efficient and satisfying by integrating appropriate visualizations