INTRODUCTION

In 1969, planner Sherry Arnstein proposed an eight-step scale characterizing levels of public involvement in planning (see Figure 1).

Arnstein's Ladder has remained current (Maier 2001, Wondolleck et al. 1996, Brenneis and M'Gonigle 1992, McCoy et al. 1994) and is still a subject of debate (Laurini 2001:24). However, there are no direct measurements of Arnstein's Ladder in the literature. Accordingly, since 2003 the authors have used Arnstein's Ladder at public meetings as an index for measuring perceptions of citizen involvement. Referencing Arnstein's Ladder (see Figure 1) these two questions are asked:

1. In your experience, how would you characterize public participation in transportation planning and design processes using this Ladder?

2. Where should public participation in transportation planning and design processes be located?

Responses are gathered on a scale of 1 to 8 through an electronic polling system that allows responses to be collected anonymously and in real time. More than 500 citizens from various forums in Kentucky, Indiana, and Arizona have responded. At the Transportation Research Board's 2006 Annual Meeting, 59 transportation professionals also were surveyed using the same protocol (Figure 2).

These data indicate a strong agreement that both citizens and professionals expect the same degree of "partnership." They also show that citizens recognize the technical role of engineers and planners. Conversely, professionals and academics often assume (fear) that the most desirable condition is the top rung of "citizen control" (Vanderwal 1999; Campbell and Marshall 2000: 321). These data suggest that fear is unfounded.

Note, however, the deficit between "desired" and "mean" ratings generally. We call this difference the "Arnstein Gap" (Bailey and Grossardt 2006:339). The Arnstein Gap is a heuristic metric to measure existing quality deficit of public involvement by characterizing a complex set of issues in a single, easily comprehensible index. The Arnstein Gap indicates that citizens desire a planning and design system that is more directly responsive to public needs.

Comparing the professionals' opinions with the public's opinion also shows that professionals consider their public participation processes more effective than the public does (4.5 vs. 3.5). An unpaired t-test of this difference provides a 95 percent statistical confidence that the measured difference in judgment is significant. Clearly, professionals are not doing as well as the public would like, nor even as well as they think they are.

THE USES OF TECHNOLOGY

More than 30 years ago, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) published a group of papers exploring the potential for computer visualization to improve the quality of public involvement in transportation planning. In that issue, Arnstein and Winder (1975, 44-48) presciently discussed a series of problems with citizen participation that were likely not substantially improved by visualization tools. These problems included, among others: which citizens participate, accountability of transportation officials, equity of benefits and disbenefits, and citizen distrust.

Over the intervening years, the advantages of visualization as a means of presenting design and larger-scale planning options have been documented extensively in transit design options (Cervero and Bosselman 1998) and in transportation more broadly (Landphair and Larsen 1996, 1993). These advantages include easier comprehension and information density and accessibility compared with written specifications and codes (Hughes 1993, 1998). However, these sorts of advantages do little to address the more persistent and fundamental issues raised by Arnstein and many others after her.

We propose to carefully examine the challenge of improved citizen participation in the context of current planning and design processes. We embrace the potential of technologies in this endeavor but believe they must be integrated with a careful analysis of exactly which problems of participation are being solved and how, and with what compromises. We proceed with this analysis, not from the standpoint of the technologies, but from the standpoint of the citizen, and what we believe should be the touchstone of all public involvement: fairness and justice.