City Infrastructure Expansion: Leveraging Technology for Public Support

By Balaji Sreenivasan, CEO, Aurigo

One of the toughest jobs city managers face is getting buy-in from the public on infrastructure projects. These projects, such as highways, roads, and bridges, are often essential for economic growth and development but can be met with fierce opposition from residents. Projects such as Boston’s Big Dig have become notorious for their soaring costs and vociferous objections from the local community, resulting in long delays. While almost everyone agrees on the need for good public transportation for urban areas to thrive, the what, how, where, and when of these valuable projects can easily become contentious issues.

The success of public infrastructure projects is inextricably linked with effective public engagement. However, public trust is at an all-time low thanks to the uncomfortable truth that most city construction projects are delivered over budget and over schedule. Timely dialogue with concerned constituents is often hindered by outdated public engagement mechanisms. For instance, city councils and construction companies rely on time-consuming, manual processes to not only capture and respond to these valuable, grassroots perspectives but also for the overall management of complex, multi-million-dollar projects.

However, pioneering councils are finding new methods to modernize the way that expansion projects, including public consultations, are handled and run. The construction sector as a whole is on the brink of a radical technological transformation that has the potential to respond to public opinion, accelerate delivery, and reduce costs. This article looks at how city councils can benefit from these modern mechanisms for public engagement.

The challenges of public engagement

Public sentiment is deeply personal. Common reasons for opposing infrastructure projects may be lack of transparency, previous planning failure, or budget and schedule overruns, but it’s the impact on people’s lives and neighborhoods where the biggest concerns lie. Capturing these is key to success. As one McKinsey report pithily put it, “Consulting stakeholders before digging makes for better, cheaper projects”.

To be truly effective, public engagement needs to form a continuous feedback loop that integrates with existing design, planning, and execution workflows. While public engagement will nominally be part of any proposal, how effectively city councils and planners can respond to sentiment is, in reality, limited by several factors. In an industry traditionally steeped in manual processes for collecting feedback – think surveys, town halls, website forms – gauging public feedback takes time. It also tends to skew towards the loudest voices and does not always accurately represent the community as a whole. Last, but not least, archaic processes and legacy systems effectively silo different workflows, offering little room for integration or reappraisal once an infrastructure project is underway. It means that a public engagement initiative usually runs in parallel, an (almost) discrete project alongside the already vast job of planning a public infrastructure initiative.  

The role of technology in effective public engagement

Change is coming, however. Maturing technology, combined with significant government-led incentivization, will deliver rapid digitization in all aspects of transportation expansion. One of the most important and overlooked areas that will benefit is public engagement.

Technologies such as cloud processing, AI, and data analytics have the potential to transform community engagement, promoting inclusivity, speeding up feedback and response mechanisms, and impacting the ultimate design. An added impetus to accelerate digitization will come from the national directive, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which aims to overhaul critical infrastructure assets. With a funding pot of $1.2 trillion available, city planners and construction companies will be keen to demonstrate they have the digital credentials to coordinate complex, next-generation projects seamlessly, a feat that would be nearly impossible using manual means.

The digitization of community engagement has a pivotal, often overlooked role to play in helping megaprojects run smoothly. Delivering timely, up-to-date information to stakeholders can speed up project delivery and reduce cost overruns by 30% to 50%  – no small achievement considering how routinely transportation megaprojects run over schedule and over budget.

Improving access to information and increasing participation

Earlier integration of public feedback by city councils is already underway and forward-thinking construction programs are beginning to reap the benefits of digitized workflows. Perhaps the most radical aspect of modern, technology-enabled community engagement is its potential to improve participation and representation among underserved areas of the community.  The new breed of digital engagement platforms makes it easier for a wider range of perspectives to be captured, using social media channels to reach more constituents than traditional methods alone.

Earlier inclusion into the decision-making process is key to public buy-in. At the same time, sophisticated AI-based analysis spots trends early and cuts processing time, enabling timely communications between constituents and agency planners. For example, it would take the Louisiana Department of Transport and Development (DOTD) many hours to gather feedback from public hearings, emails, and calls, which would all need to be transcribed, manually sorted, and then analyzed. Louisiana DOTD was able to drastically cut the time required to streamline and analyze feedback once they implemented a modern community engagement platform. In addition, the platform enabled Louisiana DOTD to communicate easily with constituents across many different channels, including social media, resulting in wider constituent engagement, fairer community representation, and improved awareness about its feedback processes.

Democratizing feedback to shape transportation outcomes

Modern community engagement practices don’t just gather feedback, they shape policy. Enabled by technologies such as AI and data analytics, improved community feedback loops have become a powerful tool for garnering public buy-in and ensuring transportation planning policy more equitably represents their needs. Increasingly, examples are emerging across the USA of the benefits of tighter integration between community outreach and infrastructure planning, such as the Greater Madison Metropolitan Planning Organization (GNMPO), whose intentional and proactive engagement early in the planning process promotes participation and perspectives from all parts of the community and in turn has improved the fairness of project and plan outcomes.

The future of public engagement for infrastructure expansion

Digital disruption is coming to the construction industry, that much is certain. With the tools now at hand to capture and relay constituent feedback, city councils have an important role in engaging with the community, listening to perspectives, and course-correcting if needed. Earlier public buy-in is a major factor in reducing budget and time overruns. With the power of AI-based digitization, city infrastructure projects will experience a paradigm shift, enabling the delivery of successful projects in a way that is timely, cost-effective, and reflects the needs of the communities they serve.