Developing and Advancing Effective Public Involvement and Environmental Justice Strategies for Rural and Small Communities

The objective of this research was to help transportation planners, practitioners and other decision makers in rural areas and other smaller communities develop effective, locally appropriate, replicable strategies for public involvement in transportation planning and programming, especially to engage environmental justice communities in working with transportation planners to co-create strategies that will mitigate or avoid prospective environmental justice issues. Working initially with six competitively selected planning organizations in rural and urban areas of less than 200,000 population, the research found that effective practices for public involvement in transportation planning required as diverse a set of strategies in smaller metropolitan areas as in those with much larger populations, but smaller areas’ planning agencies have correspondingly smaller staffs, and must be selective in their use of various public involvement strategies.