Measuring the Effectiveness of Community Impact Assessment: Recommended Core Measures

The Florida Department of Transportation has released a report that examines performance measures or measures of effectiveness for community impact assessment. The report also assesses actual impacts after a transportation action and identifies methods for collecting feedback to inform future actions.

For more than a decade, transportation agencies have refocused efforts to involve communities when considering transportation actions in order to assess the social impacts of the proposed actions. These efforts have included great public involvement, training, and other guidance for transportation professionals; and the compilation of a number of techniques and tools commonly identified as the community impact assessment (CIA) process. Considerable resources have been directed towards these efforts. The enactment of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) mandated a more streamlined process for consideration of environmental impacts while assuring the inclusion of the public, particularly traditionally underserved subgroups of the population, in the decisionmaking process. The need exists to examine from multiple perspectives whether CIA is an effective process and how it can be enhanced to meet regulatory requirements and improve the quality of life.

The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), particularly the Environmental Management Office (EMO), is a nationally recognized leader in developing and implementing programs and tools to effectively work with communities. The EMO, through the FDOT Research Center, contracted with the University of South Florida to investigate the effectiveness of CIA. Building on past efforts, the objectives of this research included identifying effective performance measures for CIA; assessing impacts after a transportation action; and identifying methods for meaningful feedback. To meet these objectives, the researchers reviewed transportation actions in varying stages to determine how potential impacts were identified, how alternatives were identified, and whether the actions address the needs of a broad range of users.