NCDOT enhances its ability to establish relationships, credibility and consensus throughout the course of the transportation decision-making process by using a variety of methods to engage the public. Organizing and implementing public hearings, while effective, falls short on involving all stakeholder groups who would be affected by the implemented project. Public hearings inform and invite members of the public who live nearby and would incur the most perceived short- and medium-term adverse effects from the project. However, public hearings do not effectively engage members of the public who use the project corridor to transit and would have the most perceived medium- and long-term benefit. In this project we value-added existing public outreach strategies by augmenting them with powerful spatial analysis tools creating analytics and easy-to-understand visualizations, state of the art targeted information dissemination techniques, and a user friendly spatial public engagement portal. We worked with NCDOT staff members including Communications Office staff as well as construction project staff to evaluate the analysis and communication tools. The feedback we received was positive, concluding that the analysis tools were very useful, especially for large projects. Demo videos of the interactive mapping platform (WebApp) and all the analysis tools are accessible following this link:
https://go.ncsu.edu/OutreachAnalysisToolsDemoVideos
