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In March, Dr Ted Grossardt presented to CART. He is an expert on public participation technology and group decision making. Listen in as he shares his technology and experience in the context of land-use and transportation questions.

UPDATE: Summary from the meeting minutes (though you should still listen to the whole thing!):

David M. introduced Dr. Ted Grossardt, a geographer at the Kentucky Transportation Center at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Grossardt provided several examples of how the Center, not part of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, was hired to work on public planning and involvement for complex infrastructure projects. Dr. Grossardt illustrated the technology, visualization software, and rules to guide decision-making which are the techniques of the Center.

One of the demonstrations involved passing out to the CART audience the keypads used by participants at public meetings which are convened to determine preferences for designs or other criteria-based scenarios. In Jeffersonville, IN, the innovative software converted the keypad-voting of the participants into 3-D representations of what neighborhoods would look like given their choices of various zoning restrictions.

In the meetings held by the Ohio River Bridges Project, the visualizations gave virtual in-place experiences of the bridge design choices. In Bourbon County, the work was re-use of an historic building undertaken as mitigation for the Paris Pike roadway project.

The participation technology is intended to arrive at good answers through a partnership of citizens, planners, elected and appointed officials. Several questions were raised by audience members, among them: is there support for this type of participation in SAFETEA-LU? And, what provision is there for evaluation of the actual outcomes, of “what they said would happen?”

In closing, Dr. Grossardt said that even in Europe, no one is doing what they are doing at the Kentucky Transportation Center. The audience showed enthusiastic approval of Dr. Grossardt’s presentation.