The Florida DOT defines CIA as: "the process to evaluate the effects of a transportation action on communities and their quality of life - the human environment. Its focus is on the early and continuous gathering of information from the community and other sources. This information is used as input into transportation decision making throughout the planning, project development, design, mitigation, and construction of a project."
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Florida State DOT Community Impact Assessment
Excerpt
The Impact of Transportation on Livability When transportation is people-oriented,
it can help build communities and restore community
life. It can provide the accessibility and exposure that
helps develop business. It can allow for entrepreneurial
opportunities by molding public spaces and transportation
facilities that can nurture start-up enterprises.
It can spur the identity and cohesiveness that
bring communities together and help them grow and
become safer and more attractive. more...
from
The Role of Transit in Creating Livable Metropolitan Communities
Article / Paper / Report
Evaluating Transportation Land Use Impacts
This report describes the various costs and benefits of different land use patterns, including the opportunity cost of land used for roads and parking facilities, accessibility and transportation costs, costs of providing public services, neighborhood livability and community cohesion, greenspace and habitat, preservation of cultural resources, energy consumption and pollution emissions, housing affordability, pedestrian conditions, aesthetic impacts, and equity impacts.
-- Todd Litman, Victoria Transportation Policy Institute
Article / Paper / Report
Community Impact Assessment
The Florida DOT defines CIA as:"The process to evaluate the effects of a transportation action on communities and their quality of life - the human environment. It's focus is on the early and continuous gathering of information from the community and other sources. This information is used as input into transportation decisionmaking throughout the planning, project development, design, mitigation, and construction of a project."
--
Federal Highway Administration
Article / Paper / Report
Finalizing the Preliminary Community Profile Using "Soft Data" Gathered through Community Involvement
Using soft data and community involvement provides a number
of ways to get to know the unique aspects of a community.
Basically, soft data is information gathered about the community,
its needs, and its values. It might be easiest to define "soft data" by
comparing it with "hard data." Hard data is kind of like a layer of
bricks, where each brick represents a piece of concrete information,
facts and figures. Hard data equates to census data, economics. It
gives you a picture of a place at one point in time, and it's not easy
to say whether or not you can replicate that data in the future.
--
Project for Public Spaces
Transportation Research Board (TRB)
Article / Paper / Report
Developing a Preliminary Community Profile Using Hard Data
One of the first and most important tasks in doing CIA is developing
a community profile. Community profiling allows us to gain an
understanding of the community as a whole, as well as individual
neighborhoods within the community and special groups and populations.
In general, a community profile involves the following:
1. Summarize the Past, Present, and Recently Anticipated
Future of a Place
2. Assess Community Trends and Conditions (Past and Current)
3. Take an Inventory of Study Area Features
4. Identify Community Issues
5. Summary of Findings
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Transportation Research Board (TRB)
Route 29 - Trenton, New Jersey Trenton, NJ
The project is known as the Route 29 Highway Tunnel. There were many context sensitive factors in this project stemming from the project location that impacted residences in two historic districts and the National Register Riverview Cemetery and extended to the environmentally sensitive Delaware River. Given that residents knew that the approved EIS allowed revisiting of rebuilding Route 29, it was clear from the beginning that community involvement and responsiveness to community interests and concerns would be essential to getting the project built.
In their report entitled, Lessons Learned in Preparing US 17 Community Impact Assessment, The North Carolina DOT states as the most important lesson learned from preparing this CIA, which included eleven ethnically and economically diverse impacted communities was that "the traditional public involvement techniques used today reduce or eliminate the opportunities for most low income and minority populations to participate in the process. These traditional techniques cater to a segment of the population that is white, English-speaking, middle to upper class, well educated, transportation independent who work an 8:00 am to 5:00 pm job and want meetings in their neighborhoods. They reflect the demographics of the agency/person who was conducting the public involvement and their view that the public they wanted to involve was just like themselves." Read specifics about why these traditional Public Involvement Techniques don't work, alternative techniques that do work, and the need for flexibility to ensure that you are "reaching, involving, and giving voice to the public, THE WHOLE PUBLIC."
